God does not just happen to love, nor is it true that he chooses to be love to certain individuals, as if he could just as easily have chosen not to love them. Rather, it is impossible for God to be God and to act in an unloving way towards anyone. If God is love, then all God’s actions must be compatible with his love. This means that his holiness is loving, his justice is loving, and his wrath is loving. . . . Consequently, any account of hell must see hell as a manifestation of divine love and mercy even if it is a severe side of that mercy. . . . How could God be love if he draws a line at death and says, “Beyond this point I will look for the lost sheep no more; and even if they try to return, I shall turn them away.” It seems to me that such a God would not be behaving in a loving way. In conclusion, I suggest that the problem is not that the universalist sentimentalizes God’s love and forgets his wrath but, rather, that the traditional theologians underestimate God’s love and unhelpfully disconnect it from his justice.
— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 104