Marx and satan.

Where Christ Still Suffers Marx and Satan

Where Christ Still Suffers, by Richard Wurmbrand (Bridge Publishing, 160 pp., $2.95, paper)

Marx and Satan, by Richard Wurmbrand (Crossway, 143 pp., $5.95, paper)

THE COMMUNIST persecution of Christianity is the greatest scandal in the world today. It has been going on since 1917 and has ceased to be a serious topic of interest even in most of the free churches of the West. Communism seems to have more accomplices than critics among the Western clergy, while Christians are still imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by Communist regimes from Cuba to Poland to Vietnam.

By torture I mean beating, gouging out eyes, sexual mutilation, and forcing people to watch their children tortured and murdered. Sometimes Christians have been forced to torture and kill each other, producing agonies of betrayal and destruction of self-respect in addition to the physical pain.

It is not too much to say that these things are diabolical. If Aquinas has five proofs for God's existence, Communism offers mountains of evidence for Satan's. Yet the secularized West, including Christians, prefers not to acknowledge this dimension of Communism, horridly cruel and envious even in earthly terms, but instead observes a diplomatic inattention. Even conservatives prefer to frame their attacks on Communism in terms of milder "human-rights violations' and "economic failure.' Maybe the truth is too unpleasant even for enemies of Communism; we prefer to sustain our enmity on terms more comfortable to ourselves, less demanding of effort and, yes, compassion. Eastern Christians must feel desolate and abandoned.

Richard Wurmbrand is a Lutheran pastor from Rumania who spent 14 years in prison for his faith. It takes a powerful faith not to think of those 14 years as wasted. But since his release to the West he has made up for lost time, preaching, writing books, and organizing help for the "Underground Church' of the East. His book Tortured for Christ has been printed in the millions. It is a shattering book that somehow fails to penetrate the decorous inattention of the West; if you read it you can never forget it, and yet you seldom hear about it.

Where Christ Still Suffers is another plea to Westerners to look and help. Wurmbrand writes with a relentless passion that never falls into simple emotionalism but is always thoughtful and informative. He describes the harrowing tortures, explains his own strategy and tactics, draws Scriptural analogies, philosophizes, tells uplifting anecdotes, reminisces, and gives practical advice. His book is so engrossing because it is so nearly unbearable. The agonies he describes are not only painful to read about, they are shaming reflections on people (like me) who thought they were doing enough by "opposing Communism.'

But the book itself is hortatory, not accusatory. And it's a grab-bag of colorful oddities. One fascinating section tells how Wurmbrand has learned to recognize Communist infiltrators in his organization by their body language. I once watched a man who was probably an infiltrator walking down a street. He played the role of a sailor who had defected to Canada and was now allegedly converted after a history of brutality toward Christians. He did not walk like a man burdened by the memory of past sins, however. It was the proud walk of a youngster who knew he was successfully fulfilling a risky assignment. The Bible says that Ahab repented and walked softly.

"Dogs,' he observes, "will not befriend traitors.'

Moscow, at any rate, takes Wurmbrand seriously. He has been denounced in the Soviet press. If he were taken more seriously here, Soviet-American relations would suffer, and the Soviets wouldn't like that.

Wurmbrand urges Western Christians to become "co-martyrs,' fellow-travelers with the suffering. It isn't much to ask. But how far our churches have strayed from the days when it was customary to speak of Communism as "godless' and "atheistic.' It should be the business of Christians to see to it that the persecution of Christians is as prominently identified with Communism as the persecution of Jews is with Nazism.

In Marx and Satan, Wurmbrand offers circumstantial evidence that Marx, far from being a merely secular thinker, was a Satanist. Furthermore, he contends that Communism has at its core a strong Satanist component. I can't say he makes a conclusive case, but I think it would be rash to dismiss it. At any rate, he shows that Marxism has an obsessive hostility to religion, and its persecution of religion can't be written off as incidental to its supposed pursuit of social justice. In a perverse way, religion is more central to Communism than it is to many secularized churchmen, who seem to want to refine out of consciousness the sense of sacredness that Communism wants to crush.

Marx in his youth was a devout Christian. Stalin was a seminarian. Wurmbrand quotes some fascinating passages about Stalin from Kaganovich's unpublished diaries: "Many times Stalin spoke of religion as our most vicious enemy. . . . [Yet] he always talks with some veiled respect about God and religion. . . . For example, he never said directly there was no God.' It may be as wrongheaded to write about Communism without reference to God as to write about St. Francis that way.