I don’t think I’ve ever seen this question addressed in the Church. I will say that the overwhelming tenor of the Orthodox liturgy is universalistic. The liturgy takes the Bible and dials way up the salvific and glorious stuff, and dials way down the condemnatory and frightening stuff.
Just because NTW (et al) regards human righteousness as “nothing more” than a status of having had a court (even a divine court) find in their favor, thus rendering human righteousness trivially irrelevant by effectively disconnecting it from the righteousness of God (“there is no righteousness other than God’s righteousness” as John would reply), doesn’t mean NTW himself is trivially irrelevant. Or even a lesser Christian, though there is literally nothing more than a judicial theology going on here, consonant with the sheerest unitarian monotheism, thus quite a lesser Christianity.
It ought to be sufficiently obvious from how I interpret the sheep and the goats, if nothing else, that I regard a lesser Christology as being completely irrelevant to whether a person is a superior Christian, seeing as how the sheep had demonstrably no Christology whatever; and however high a Christology the baby goats had, is also completely irrelevant to them being effectively non-Christian in any way that Christ cares about. 
Even those who know to give the “Lord Lord” and who may be praised by God Himself for caring enough about doctrine to test even apostles, may be thrown into the outer darkness where the wailing is and the gnashing of the teeth; whereas Christ praises those doing good in His name even if they are not following the apostles – while warning the apostles themselves they will by no means be entering the kingdom, but are in danger of being thrown into the unquenchable fire of the tormenters, for thinking too highly of themselves!
So don’t take anything I say about a theology as being personally about the person.
Darn, I was hoping you had actually read NTW. Since you either have read and have chosen to mis-represent (and you would not do that) or you’ve only got some second-hand understanding, I don’t even know where to start on the quote above.
My point was to try and add something to the OP discussion, by focusing not so much on translation but the overall message which is often wildly misunderstood and no wonder, it is a difficult letter to understand. NTW has spent most of his life dealing with the letter, so I thought he might be of marginal usefulness. But I don’t follow all the links that are posted either, so I’m not really complaining.
“Literally nothing more than a judicial theology going on here” - 'here?
Thanks for those. It generally seems obvious to me reading the NT who is reconciling who (or rather, Who is reconciling who). Shame most don’t seem to pay too much attention to that.
Do you (or anyone else with a much better grasp on Greek than me) have any additional comments to make on the word hilasterion? Only I know how notoriously difficult it is to translate and to decide precisely what it means and I know that there have been many attempts to force different definitions onto it. I read somewhere that the word is actually more closely connected to the word ‘hill’ (with the idea of covering [covering sin?]) than it is to ‘hilarious’ but I’ve no means of evaluating that claim. Any more additional background/comments on that?
It seems to me that the safest rendering of the word is “propitiation place” or “propitiatory shelter” although I am aware of the case for taking it to be an adjective rather than a noun.
If the word is translated as a noun then the problems disappear. It only occurs twice in the NT, the other reference is Heb 9 5 where it is more correctly?? translated in the AV as “mercy seat”. It occurs once in the LXX in Ex 25 16 (again as mercy seat).
I don’t know if this article is of value to you:
biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/eq/1987-2_099.pdf
I had a quick read of that article the other day. Might go through it again
I think you’re way ahead of me. I’ve just found this one interesting for myself:
katachriston.wordpress.com/2011 … -attitude/
This sermon from Peter Hiett at the Sanctuary Downtown I found very helpful and it addresses this matter to some degree regarding a, God’s faithfulness and b, how we react to it. How to Not Go Away Sadhttp://www.tsdowntown.com/sermon-dat … o-away-sad