Fifty years ago on Palm Sunday, on April 9, 1945, the Nazis hauled Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell in Flossenburg, Germany, put a rope around his neck and hanged him.

His crime was active opposition to the Hitler regime. Days after the execution, American soldiers liberated the concentration camp. The tyranny for which Bonhoeffer had died was itself dead.

In the half-century since, for believers of all faiths, this Lutheran pastor has stood as a symbol of courage. Because he was not only a political warrior of splendid valor but also a minister of deep devotion, he has become the 20th century's quintessential Christian martyr.

But to look back over five decades is to see another side. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was first and last a theologian. He ignited a religious controversy that burns today, and the flames are felt not least by Anglicans.

Quick to make the most of Bonhoeffer's theories was a school he would surely have repudiated, the death of God theologians. In 1963, the Rt. Rev. John A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, a London suburb, published Honest to God, which was attacked with fury and is still deplored by many. The book consists of 141 short pages, and its index lists Dietrich Bonhoeffer's name 18 times.

Across the Atlantic, when another super-liberal Anglican, the Rt. Rev. James A. Pike, Bishop of California, sought a more with-it concept of God, he, too, quoted extensively from Bonhoeffer. More recently, Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark used Bonhoeffer as a springboard to dive into the question: "Who is Christ for our day?"

And who indeed was the gentle German whose valor earned such glory while his ideas sparked such a furor? Born in Breslau (now part of Poland) in 1906, the son of a well-to-do professor of psychiatry, he studied theology at the universities of Tubingen and Berlin, followed by a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Back home, he served parishes and became a popular preacher and even more popular lecturer at the University of Berlin. A student remembered him as tall, muscular, "fair, rather thin hair, broad face, rimless glasses." His early theology was hardly liberal enough to raise eyebrows. He led youth groups and began to attract attention at ecumenical conferences throughout Europe.

In 1933, when Hitler started to discriminate against Jews, Bonhoeffer was the first prominent theologian to protest. The time will come, he warned, "not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself."

Then Hitler tried to incorporate the German churches into the state, and again Bonhoeffer helped spark the opposition. He became so disgusted with the Third Reich that he left to serve two German-speaking congregations in London. In 1935, he returned home to establish a quasi-legal seminary that he hoped to keep free of Nazi control. In an almost monastic setting in rural Pomerania, he created a brotherhood of young pastors eager to fight for church independence.

His theology began to mirror his worldly concerns. The Cost of Discipleship accuses churches of peddling "cheap grace" - that is, forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without contrition ... grace without the cross." Instead Bonhoeffer challenged Christians to the "costly grace" of total commitment to a Christ who suffered and who still lives "for others."

In 1937, the Nazis shut down Bonhoeffer's seminary, but he kept rallying the "illegal" pastors, traveling continuously and keeping a low profile. In 1939 church groups in the United States offered him a three-year lecture tour. He came to New York - for four weeks. After an agony of indecision, his conscience compelled him to forego freedom and go home. Two months later Germany invaded Poland and World War I I was on.

Bonhoeffer kept writing. His Ethics puts Jesus at the center of everything and exhorts us to let Christ "form" our lives. Between the lines we can read the author's own ethical torment. He was a patriotic German who abhored the Nazis. Did the will of God allow, or even mandate, violence against the oppressors? Bonhoeffer decided it did. He determined to put that "spoke in the wheel."

A secret anti-Hitler group within military intelligence recruited Bonhoeffer as an agent. This allowed him to travel abroad and gave him cover to gather and transmit information on the resistance. Thus he led three lives: seen by the world as the brilliant theologian and ecumenical leader; believed by the Gestapo to be spying for the Nazis, and known to the cell of conspirators to be working to overthrow the regime.

Three times he traveled to Switzerland and once to Sweden to meet secretly with Allied intermediaries - one of them an old friend and Anglican bishop, the Rt. Rev. George Bell of Chichester. He even managed to visit patriots in occupied Norway.

But the deception could not last. The Nazis discovered that Bonhoeffer had helped Jews escape across the Swiss border. Eventually, he was found to be part of the inner circle that plotted to assassinate Hitler. On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested at his parents' home in Berlin. He was 37 years old and had just become engaged to be married.

For two years he survived in three prisons, including Buchenwald, before being shuttled to Flossenburg. On April 8, 1945, even as Allied guns could be heard, he was "tried" in a single night and sentenced to hang the next morning. On the way to the gallows he was allowed to kneel and pray. A prison doctor noted: "I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God."

Twenty-eight days later bells pealed for V-E Day.

From prison, Bonhoeffer smuggled out a wealth of letters preserved by his friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge. They are Bonhoeffer's most enduring claim to fame.

Many today think these unsystematic jottings, written under brutal conditions, veer widely from Bonhoeffer's earlier theology; others see a single thread through all. In any case, Bonhoeffer, his body enclosed by prison walls, allowed his mind to soar beyond the boundaries of convention. We live, he declared, "in a world come of age." People now call on God only when other resources fail. God has become a "God of the gaps."

Bonhoeffer pictured a God some found shocking: "God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him ... God allows himself to be edged out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless ... and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us."

Bonhoeffer urged "a religionless Christianity." He defined religion as "metaphysics, inwardness" and "an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence." Religion, he said, helped in the past but is no use now. "It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world."

Did Bonhoefffer go too far? Today many would say he did. He wanted to tear up two millennia of worship by the roots and start over. He wanted to throw out traditions we treasure, imagery and insights that lie at the core of our belief. He failed to cherish the continuity of Christianity through the centuries.

Would the world pay heed to his theology had it not been created by a martyr at a moment of highest drama? Perhaps not, and perhaps we need more than 50 years to see how much a prophet Dietrich Bonhoeffer will prove. Yet if he aimed to open up a new way to seek God, he succeeded. Already he has jolted the spiritual complacency of two generations. Above all, he leaves a legacy of heroism that fires our imagination and sustains our faith.

"Whoever would find Christ," he once said, "must go to the foot of the cross." And he wrote, "We throw ourselves completely into the arms of God." Like Christ, Bonhoeffer in his 30s stood at the pinnacle of success. He could have stayed to savor the hosannas of the crowd; instead, for freedom and for us, he plunged on to arrest and execution. Palm Sunday is a good time to remember him. o