Richard Wurmbrand
Richard Wurmbrand ( born March 24, 1909 in Bucharest, † February 17, 2001 in Glendale, California ) was a Romanian Lutheran pastor and founder of a missionary society, which has been used for the needs of disadvantaged or persecuted Christians.
Life
Richard Wurmbrand was born the fourth son of a German - Jewish family dentist. 1918 his father died and the family impoverished. At 16, he later said he had been an ardent communist and atheist. In the 1930s he was businessman, it brought about prosperity and participated in the exuberant life of the Romanian capital, the " Paris of the Balkans". In 1936 he married Sabine Oster, who was also of Jewish descent. In 1938, her only child, son Michael, was born.
In 1937, Wurmbrand came under his autobiography by an old German carpenter in a small Romanian village to the Christian faith. After he was trained at the Anglican mission for Jews and ordained pastor. In his church and in his private home, the Jews found refuge and protection from the onset of anti-Semitic persecution.
In 1948, he was arrested, interrogated and tortured. The prisoner in prison Sighet took eight years to 1956. Three years he spent in strict solitary confinement in underground dungeons, without sunlight or sounds of the outside world. Under the condition that no longer preach, he was amnestied. Three years later he was again arrested and imprisoned until 1964. For $ 10,000 Norwegian Christians could freely buy ( Norwegian Mission to the Jews and Hebrew - Christian Alliance) him and his family.
Only in 1990 were allowed to travel back to Romania, Richard and Sabine Wurmbrand after 25 years of exile. In 2006 he was elected to the fifth place of a list of the 100 most famous Romanians.
Work
In the West, Wurmbrand was the founder of a worldwide mission society, which campaigned for the persecuted Christians behind the Iron Curtain. In 1967 he published his experiences in communist prison in his first book "Tortured for Christ" ( German 1968 Tortured for Christ ). It has been translated into 65 languages , reaching a total circulation of over four million copies.
In Germany today there is the Christian Mission Association ( also known as " Voice of the Martyrs "), which was founded by him in 1969. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it is increasingly active in the Islamic world.
In worm Brands books, some details are unreliable, which in particular reduces the value of his non-fiction. In a book he claims, for example, that the prompt " do not you be afraid! " Exactly 366mal is common to the Bible - to a certain extent for each day of the year (including for a leap day ) once. Actually, however, this call is only about 100 times in the Bible.
In another book Wurmbrand spread the unbelievable news that Charles Darwin had converted shortly before his death to the Christian faith and distanced himself from his theory of evolution.
Thanks to the prevalence of worm Brands books and magazines of any errors contained therein are widespread.
Bibliography
- In God's underground. With Christ 14 years in communist prisons. Evangelism publishing Bergshausen, o.J. [about 1967 ]
- Tortured for Christ, German: Tortured for Christ. A report from suffering and confession of the martyrs church. 1st edition sowing Publishing, 1968; 19th edition, Uhldingen 2004 Christian Mission, ISBN 3981000307
- Achievable heights. Daily Devotions (1978 )
- Christ on the Jewish Road, German: Christ on the Jewish street. 2nd edition, Uhldingen 1996 Stephanus edition, ISBN 392281672X
- The overcomers.
- If prison walls could talk.
- From the lips of children.
- Atheism - a way? 35 proofs of the existence of God ( 1986)
- The Other Face of Karl Marx ( 7.Aufl. , 1987)
- Karl Marx and Satan - Was Karl Marx a Satanist?