"You look like hell," gasped a woman on TV to a disheveled man. What did she mean? What did she think hell looked like? What did the term hell contribute to her portrait? This is an example of the widespread trivializing of a once-powerful term to depict eternal damnation to mere minutia. Why does God damn the wicked to eternal punishment? Or does He? How is His judgment just? Why and how do theologians strive to modify the results of his judgment? How are we to evaluate views of hell that either soften or deny it? The doctrine of punishment of the unredeemed after death originates in the Old Testament, is developed in the intertestamental Jewish literature, and culminates in the divinely authoritative New Testament doctrine of hell. How can people avoid that dreadful fate? If they should escape from it, what should they then do? What is involved in their saving others "by snatching them out of the fire" (Jude 23)? How does the deliverance from eternal punishment enhance our appreciation of what Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross? What effect should it have on our Christian witness? Distinctive contributions include: (1) a careful exegesis of key biblical texts, containing a thorough analysis of the doctrine of hell, (2) a rationale of God's punishment of the unredeemed, (3) examination of the tours of hell genre, (4) biblical and historical theological themes of witness and evangelism, (5) ramifications of eternal damnation of the unsaved in terms of the urgency of witness.

Friedrich Schiller, the great German classical poet and friend of the American Revolution, assigned to art the task of ennobling the spirit of Man, especially at those times when political circumstances are most unfavorable, men most degraded, and when the qualities of genius are most urgently required to find a way to avert political catastrophe. Reading Schiller’s poetry, as well as his historical, philosophical, and aesthetic works, has precisely the effect on the sensitive reader of which Schiller informed us--to produce in the reader an ennobling power which then continues to exist long after the reading is done. This is volume 3 of the four volume collection of translations. Volume 3 includes Schiller Institute English translations of the following: The Virgin of Orleans--a drama about the life of Joan of Arc Introduction to The History of the Revolt of the Netherlands Against Spanish Rule Homage to the Arts The Diver Philosophical Letters On the Sublime On Naive and Sentimental Poetry