When I went to teach in the Ganges basin of India, where Christians of any kind hardly numbered one in a hundred thousand, the idea that all who had never heard the good news were condemned to hell soon became untenable. And Paul himself declared that Abraham was justified by faith long before he ever heard of Jesus, and our faith is no different from his. I think it was C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce that showed me how the metaphors of God as Love, and God as the assigner of wrath, could be structured in a quite different logical form. God as love loves everyone without exception. But there are wrath consequences for certain kinds of behavior in this life.
Murderers get hanged, adulterers break up their family, the mean and selfish have no friends.
But the very worse of behaviours can be forgiven by a loving God. The one thing that must exclude us from the city of God is a final heart rejection of love and a preference for the hellish grey city that Lewis pictured as the alternative. There was an immediate change in my structuring of the metaphors I used to think about God. It was as if the atoms in a complex molecule were now rearranged in a different configuration. But by then I was so used to feeding on the Bible as the very word of God that I had to find a logic that retained the power of its metaphors, parables, and stories.