Early church writers in the 2nd and 3rd century mainly picked up New Testament language and depicted Hell as eternal punishment for the wicked, with the imagery of fire.

Origen, original in his thinking as ever, presents a theory that the fire is purgative - designed to restore rebellious souls through purificatory suffering, and so gave voice to the hope that all might eventually be cleansed of evil and so restored to God, even the Devil. Mainstream Christianity found this unacceptable, and eventually condemned Origen for a number of his heterodox views, including this one, in 543 at a council in Constantinople.

Augustine wrote fairly extensively on divine punishment and hell, as for instance in The City of God. He maintains the view that it is eternal and punitive. He presents the idea that in hell the soul and body are reunited, but reunited in a state of perpetual death in which one can never 'die', i.e. there is no end to this death-experience. He also maintains that the eternality of hell is linked to the immensity of the one sinned against (i.e. the infinity of God).

There was no great change in this understanding through the middle ages, partly because it was not a point of theological contention. However we might say that popular understandings of hell focused on vivid elaborations of what hell was like. Dante's Divine Comedy being a later, but classic, example of this.

Theologians such as Aquinas defended this traditional view of hell, particularly against the notion that God ought better (i.e. more justly) annihilate and destroy the wicked forever.

Calvin, during the Reformation, took up the view that the language in the New Testament describing Hell (fire, darkness, gnawing worms, etc..) was metaphorical, not literal, designed to evoke in the believer's imagination a vivid conceptualisation of hell rather than to depict it exactly.

It is not until the 19th century you get radical diversion in Christian ideas about Hell. For example Schleiermacher radically reinterpreted Christianity and found no place for divine punishment as punitive or even reformative. At best they might be a warning. But then what of those suffering them? He thus revived a version of Origen's view that all souls will one day be restored.

The two main theological alternatives to the classic view became more widely adhered to. That is, annihilationism (that God destroys the wicked, and does not punish them forever), and universalism (that God, in the end, will restore all beings to himself rather than punish them). This is particularly the case with the development of Protestant Liberalism.