Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible, and the Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK): Reassessing the Historical Record
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Geffrey B. Kelly’s argument that, in 1941, the Reichsschrifttumskammer (RSK) prohibited Bonhoeffer from publishing because the agency objected to the ostensibly pro-Jewish and anti-Nazi content of Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms. The primary sources show that Kelly’s claims are unsupported by the historical record, as there is no evidence that Prayerbook figured into the deliberations of the RSK. If Prayerbook has implications for post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian conversations, then these implications must be demonstrated with reference to the text itself and not by recourse to its supposed reception by Nazi authorities. Kelly’s account exemplifies a problematic tendency to interpret Bonhoeffer, in the context of Jewish-Christian relations, through a misleadingly heroic or hagiographical lens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".