Deitrich Bonhoeffer, in the early 1930s. Photograph: Authenticated News/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

During the era of apartheid in South Africa, black Christians who called for nonviolent resistance often invoked the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran theologian who died a martyr against Nazism. In the United States, self-proclaimed “Plowshares” activists have identified Bonhoeffer as a guiding spirit behind their acts of civil disobedience, which have included breaking into weapons facilities and pounding with hammers on the silos of nuclear missiles.

In another ideological zone, the televangelist Pat Robertson quoted the German in justifying his remarks last year suggesting the United States should assassinate Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s leftist president. And President George W. Bush has spoken of Bonhoeffer when calling for an unflinching war on terror.

Bonhoeffer continues to be in “vogue,” as the Christian literary review Books & Culture put it last year. That would be an ironic way of commending the minister who railed against superficiality in all matters religious, and refused the easy path of discipleship that he dubbed “cheap grace.” Understanding what Bonhoeffer might mean to those who aspire to fight the good fight was the challenge of a September 18 evening of discussion at Boston College titled “‘Costly Discipleship’ and Contemporary Culture: Bonhoeffer as a Model for Religious Activism,” sponsored principally by the University’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (Additional sponsors were Hebrew College and the ecumenical Andover Newton Theological School, of Newton.) The discussion wrapped up a two-day conference that explored the implications of the Lutheran’s life for Christians and non-Christians alike, including his solidarity with Jewish victims of the Holocaust, on the centenary of his birth.

Bonhoeffer’s contradictions were not swept aside by presenters. Rabbi Or Rose, a Hebrew College rabbinical professor, argued that Bonhoeffer remained a Christian “supersessionist”—someone who believes, in essence, that Christians replaced or superseded Jews as the religious people under God’s particular love. “Sadly, Bonhoeffer’s critique of Jews and Judaism only increased the vulnerability of Jews in Germany,” said Rose. At the same time, Bonhoeffer held that the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures remained valid, said theologian Victoria Barnett of the Holocaust Museum, turning somewhat from Rose’s analysis. And there is no question of Bonhoeffer’s support for Jewish victims: “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing the Gregorian chant,” Bonhoeffer declared in the wake of Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”), the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews.

Perhaps the most tantalizing incongruity of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought has to do with the choice that sealed his martyrdom. He was a pacifist who never renounced his belief that violence is antithetical to Christian faith, as revealed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. And yet beginning in early 1938, he chose to abet the German resistance in conspiracies to assassinate Adolph Hitler, delivering information about them to the Allies. This turn from pure pacifism is what has allowed some today, including Pat Robertson and a number of conservative Christian bloggers, to say that Bonhoeffer would have cheered America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Near the end of the discussion, theologian Clifford Green, a Lutheran minister and noted Bonhoeffer scholar who taught at Hartford Theological Seminary for many years, suspended his moderator’s role to critique what he considers attempts to “hijack” Bonhoeffer’s legacy for ideological purposes. Figures like Bush and Robertson are “turning [Bonhoeffer’s] involvement in the conspiracies into a principle for justifying violence,” said Green. But Green added that Bonhoeffer, whose letters smuggled out of Nazi prisons between 1943 and 1945 were posthumously published, did not rationalize his actions other than to say that the situation was extreme. Bonhoeffer felt that his decision to join in the murder plots “was not justified by law or principle, but rather was a free act of Christian responsibility, for which he threw himself on the mercy of God,” in Green’s words.

For many, an enduring lesson of Bonhoeffer’s witness is that the Christian Church must always be a church, must always pay ultimate loyalty to God, not to false gods, which for Bonhoeffer included Nazism. While still in his twenties, Bonhoeffer, who began his theological career at the University of Berlin, emerged at the forefront of the new Confessing Church, an ecclesial movement that arose in 1934 and called for German Christians to resist the Nazi idol.

“He was equipped with a theological alarm system that alerted him to idolatry,” said David Gushee, a professor of moral philosophy at Union University in western Tennessee. Describing himself as an evangelical Baptist and religious activist, Gushee faulted some fellow evangelicals for exhibiting “confused loyalty” of the kind exposed by Bonhoeffer in Germany. Members of the religious right, in particular, “conflate loyalty to Jesus Christ with loyalty to the president, to the Republican Party, to the troops in the abstract,” said Gushee. He noted that Bonhoeffer’s example might more clearly lead to “small steps of resistance” to political stands of both the left and the right, citing his own public opposition to liberalized abortion and to torture.

In 1930, while teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Bonhoeffer witnessed racism against African Americans. The brilliant young theologian volunteered as a Sunday school teacher at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and there, he said, he encountered “the black Christ.” Many scholars say his experiences in New York became the lens through which he viewed the plight of the Jews in Germany, an account skillfully rendered by the filmmaker Martin Doblmeier in his documentary film Bonhoeffer, which aired recently on public television.

Bonhoeffer’s value as an archetypal activist, however, remains an open question. His choices, according to some scholars, may serve better as a window on the ambiguities of forgiveness and revenge, punishment and preemption. BC philosophy professor James Bernauer, SJ, paired Bonhoeffer’s writings with those of the German Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt, referring to her view that forgiveness can alter the political future, and to Bonhoeffer’s view that a Christian must take responsible action in a wounded, sinful world, even if the chosen course (read, a conspiracy to kill) may someday require God’s forgiveness. For his part, Rabbi Rose of Hebrew College suggested that Bonhoeffer’s supposed “triumphalist religious worldview” makes him a doubtful model in an age of global religious strife.

What is indisputable is that Bonhoeffer accepted “the cost of discipleship,” the title words of his 1937 book. On April 9, 1945, at the concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany, he was hung for his part in the anti-Hitler conspiracies, three weeks before the Allies liberated the city.

He was 39 years old.

William Bole is a journalist in Massachusetts and coauthor, with Robert T. Hennemeyer and Drew Christiansen, SJ, of Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace (2004).

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