The Work
Tortured for Christ was first published in 1967 by Diane Books Publishing Company in the United States. Richard Wurmbrand delivered its contents as a spoken testimony before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in 1966 - appearing shirtless to show the eighteen deep wounds on his body from torture - before writing them up as a book. The book runs to approximately 160 pages in most editions and is divided into chapters covering his imprisonment, the experience of torture and solitary confinement, the behavior of the underground church in Communist Romania, and his vision of the persecuted church worldwide.
The book was translated into more than sixty-five languages and has sold over eighteen million copies, making it one of the most widely distributed Christian testimonies of the twentieth century. It led directly to the founding of Jesus to the Communist World (later renamed Voice of the Martyrs) in 1967, an organization that has since documented and assisted persecuted Christians worldwide. The book is still given away free by Voice of the Martyrs to all who request it.
Biblical Engagement
Revelation 2:10 - 'Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life' - is the command to the church at Smyrna that Wurmbrand takes as his governing text. 'Be thou faithful unto death' is the call he understood himself to be obeying during fourteen years of imprisonment (1948-1956, then again 1959-1964). The crown of life promised to the faithful is not abstract eschatology for Wurmbrand but the hope that sustained men and women through torture chambers and solitary confinement.
Philippians 1:12 - 'But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel' - is Paul's assessment of his imprisonment in Rome, which Wurmbrand finds fully applicable to his own experience. He describes how Christian prisoners used their time in prison not only to sustain their own faith but to evangelize fellow prisoners and even guards - how the gospel spread through the prison system precisely because Christians were imprisoned. The paradox Paul describes - imprisonment that advances the gospel - is Wurmbrand's lived experience.
2 Corinthians 11:23 - 'Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft' - is Paul's catalogue of his sufferings, which Wurmbrand uses to ground his testimony in the apostolic tradition. He is not presenting an unusual or exceptional experience but the normal experience of those who follow Christ in hostile environments. The lineage of suffering from Paul through the martyrs to Wurmbrand is continuous.
Matthew 5:11 - 'Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake' - is the Beatitude that Wurmbrand returns to as the theological frame for what he and his fellow prisoners experienced. The persecuted are blessed: not because suffering is good in itself, but because it is the specific form in which the people of Christ have always followed him in hostile environments. This is not masochism but faithfulness.
Author and Context
Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001) was born in Bucharest, Romania, to a Jewish family. He converted to Christianity as a young man, partly through the influence of a Christian carpenter who had prayed for the conversion of a Jewish man for a decade before meeting Wurmbrand. He became a Lutheran pastor and, after the Communist takeover of Romania in 1947, was arrested in 1948 for refusing to cooperate with the Communist-controlled 'patriotic priests' movement.
His fourteen years of imprisonment (in two periods, separated by a brief release) included periods of solitary confinement of three years, during which he was denied any reading material. He describes composing and memorizing 350 poems and sermons during this time. He was subjected to repeated torture using methods designed to induce long-term physical and psychological damage.
Wurmb rand was ransomed by the Norwegian government and by Jewish organizations in 1964 for ten thousand dollars. After his release he emigrated to Norway and then to the United States, where he testified before Congress and wrote the book. His wife Sabina, who had also been imprisoned (for two years in labor camps), wrote her own memoir The Pastor's Wife (1970).
The Underground Church
One of the book's most powerful sections describes the underground church in Communist Romania: the networks of believers who worshipped secretly, distributed Bibles, and maintained Christian community under conditions of total surveillance. Wurmbrand describes extraordinary acts of courage - pastors who continued to preach knowing it would mean arrest, laypeople who copied Scripture by hand for distribution, children who maintained their faith in the face of systematic atheist indoctrination in schools.
This portrait of the underground church served a rhetorical purpose: it challenged Western Christians who had compromised with or accommodated hostile political systems to look at what faithfulness looked like under genuine persecution. The implicit question was whether comfortable Western Christianity was prepared to pay any cost for its faith.
Critical Reception
The book's immediate reception was shaped by its political context: Cold War America was receptive to accounts of Communist persecution, and Wurmbrand's testimony fitted a well-established narrative. Christian reviewers praised it as a modern Acts of the Apostles - a continuation of the martyrs' story. Secular reviewers were more cautious about the specific theological claims but generally accepting of the factual account of Communist persecution.
Subsequent scholarship on Communist-era Romanian Christianity has generally confirmed Wurmbrand's account of systematic persecution, while noting that his own situation was somewhat unusual: the specific targeting of Protestant clergy for extended isolation and torture was not the universal experience of Romanian Christians.
Theological Significance
The book's theological contribution is its insistence that the persecuted church is not the church's exceptional history but its normal history - that the comfortable Western church is the anomaly, not the suffering church of Communist Romania, China, or the Middle East. This claim challenges any Christian theology that makes comfort and success the expected form of Christian life, and grounds the church's existence in solidarity with the suffering Christ rather than in cultural establishment.
Legacy
Voice of the Martyrs, founded as a direct result of the book, now operates in over seventy countries documenting and assisting persecuted Christians. The organization distributes Tortured for Christ free of charge worldwide. The book has been translated into more languages than any other twentieth-century Christian memoir. Its influence on Christian consciousness of global persecution - its creation of the term 'persecuted church' as a category for Christian attention and prayer - is incalculable.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Revelation 2:8-11 (the letter to Smyrna: the persecuted church), Matthew 5:10-12 (the Beatitude of persecution), Acts 4:23-31 (the early church's prayer in the face of persecution), Hebrews 11:35-40 (the martyrs who were tortured), and 2 Corinthians 4:7-18 (treasure in clay jars; the outward wasting and inward renewal).
Further Reading
- Sabina Wurmbrand, The Pastor's Wife (1970) - Sabina's account of her own imprisonment and the family's experience. - Andrew Boyd, Baroness Cox: A Voice for the Voiceless (1998) - the story of another major advocate for persecuted Christians, in the tradition of Wurmbrand. - Glenn Penner, In the Shadow of the Cross: A Biblical Theology of Persecution and Discipleship (2004) - the most thorough theological treatment of persecution in the New Testament.