The Last Will Be First

To contemporary sensibilities, the idea of divine judgment can seem at best off-putting, at worst a reason to jettison the biblical text altogether. Long gone are the days of Puritan preachers and their fiery, turn-or-burn tirades--but should preachers and teachers wholly avoid the topic of divine judgment? In the words of Dostoyevsky's character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov , "What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?" Or, as Mary Ann Tolbert asks, "What happens