Scholar's Dream

Moves

Every argument a book can make. Power and accuracy work the way you expect; the type is the method of persuasion, and how well it lands depends on what the other side is arguing from. Click a row for the quotation the move actually puts on the table.

934 of 934

Move ▲	Type	Cat.	Pwr	Acc	PP	What it does
114 Secret Sayings	Lie	Argument	50	100%	20	A pile of sayings with no story attached.
A Bath-Keeper’s Baptism	Faith	Argument	62	100%	20	Luther’s joke with a serious edge. Without the Word, he says, baptismal water is the water the servant cooks with. With the Word it is a sacrament, and he calls it Christ-baptism.
A Bewildered Ape	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	99	The question that follows once the mind is said to be a product of blind forces. If the brain is only what nature happened to make, why trust its logic more than its mistakes? Chesterton puts it as the sceptic’s own challenge, and it is a fair one.
A Bible! A Bible!	Exegesis	Argument	88	100%	10	The book puts this sentence in the mouths of Christians it calls fools. It is the argument against a closed Bible, stated by making fun of the people who hold one.
A Book to the Unlettered	Ecclesiology	Argument	70	100%	15	The pastoral half of the argument, and the half that actually persuaded most of Christendom: most people in an eighth-century church could not read a word of the book being preached from.
A Boy That Driveth the Plough	Bible	Argument	88	95%	10	Tyndale said this to a learned man who claimed the church’s law mattered more than God’s. It explains why he translated the Bible, and he was strangled and burned for doing it.
A Constant Adhering	Faith	Argument	80	100%	15	Defines the word before using it, which is not Luther’s usual habit and is the reason this argument works. Assertion here is not shouting. It is holding on, and going on holding on.
A Continued Miracle	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	10	The last sentence of Hume’s chapter on miracles. He says that anyone who believes Christianity must have had a miracle happen inside his own head. He meant it as mockery.
A Council May Err	History	Argument	84	100%	10	The thing he had not meant to say and could not unsay. Cornered about Hus, he went further than he had planned — and a general council joined the pope on the list of things that can be wrong.
A Debt Testimony Never Owed	Rationality	Argument	76	100%	10	Campbell states Hume’s principle plainly and shows the circle. Hume says testimony is trustworthy only as far as experience supports it. But our experience was largely built by trusting testimony in the first place.
A Deposed King	Anthropology	Argument	78	100%	10	Pascal’s argument about human nature in two sentences. Knowing you are wretched is a kind of greatness; a tree does not mourn. Our misery is the misery of a king who has lost his throne.
"A Different God"	Lie	Argument	55	100%	99
A Different Religion	Presupposition	Argument	96	100%	10	Machen’s thesis, and it is a claim about categories rather than a charge of heresy. Liberalism keeps the vocabulary of Christianity and means something else by all of it, which makes it more corrosive than open unbelief.
A Disputed Name	Christology	Argument	60	100%	99	Tradition credits this book to al-Ghazali, but many scholars now think a Coptic Christian who became a Muslim wrote it. Either way, it answers Christ’s claims to divinity one by one from the Gospels themselves.
A Distinction Artfully Suggested	History	Argument	92	100%	10	Hume allows that testimony can establish what is merely unheard of, and never what is contrary to experience. Campbell reads him through for the difference and cannot find one that is doing any work: both phrases mean the same thing in his hands — something nobody has seen yet.
A Fiction of Men	Lie	Argument	80	100%	99	The emperor opens by naming what he thinks he is looking at: a story that works on the part of a man that likes stories, and has nothing else in it.
A Finite Thing Cannot Hold the Infinite	Rationality	Argument	62	100%	99	Not a quarrel over one verse. A trained Aristotelian works the doctrines over on their own philosophical terms and calls the results unintelligible, not merely unproven.
A Flame Was Kindled	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	10	Justin had tried the Stoics, the Aristotelians, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists when an old man by the sea pointed him to the prophets. He did not stop being a philosopher. He said this was where philosophy led.
A Foreign God to Supplant Us	Spirituality	Argument	78	100%	99	A message read out at the Swedish assembly, from the gods, on the arrival of the bishop’s ship. The complaint is not that the new god is false. It is that the sacrifices have fallen off.
A Fruitless Endeavor	Biblical Theology	Argument	96	100%	10	Bavinck says plainly that it does not work. Religion cut off from knowledge and belief, reduced to trust alone, is not a purer faith. It can no longer say what it trusts in.
A God for Every Village	Rationality	Argument	62	100%	15	Egypt does not know the gods of Phoenicia, and the next village worships what this one calls unclean. If they cannot agree among themselves, the agreement is not what makes any of them true.
A God Who Knew the Way Out of the Grave	History	Argument	96	100%	10	Europe has been turned upside down again and again, and each time Christianity has been counted dead, and each time it has been found on top. Chesterton’s reason is short. The faith has died many times, and it has risen again each time, because its God knew the way out of the grave.
A Good God Made It Good	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	10	Origen thought the world was built as a prison — bodies handed out to fallen souls by way of sentence, each one a punishment sized to its crime. Augustine answers that the reason for the world is simpler and better than that, and that Genesis says so every time it finishes a day.
A Gracious Appointment of God	Ecclesiology	Argument	64	100%	20	Booth’s method in a sentence. Baptism is a positive ordinance, he says, which means its meaning has to come from what God has said and nowhere else. A person has no more right to invent a meaning for a rite than to appoint the rite.
A Hundred Real Dollars	Rationality	Argument	94	95%	8	Kant’s answer to the ontological argument. Saying that God exists adds nothing to the idea of God, just as a hundred real coins are the same hundred as imagined ones.
A Law Presupposes an Agent	Natural Theology	Argument	90	100%	10	Tell Paley the watch is the result of the laws of metallic nature and he asks what a law is. It is the manner in which something acts — a description of a power, never the power itself. Take away the thing acting and the law has nothing left to describe.
A Messiah, Not This One	Exegesis	Argument	55	100%	99	A minority reading within Judaism itself: the servant of Isaiah 53 IS the Messiah — the argument is never that no one is meant, only that Jesus is not he.
A Moderate Religion Is as Good as None	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Screwtape, a senior devil, writing to his nephew. The tempter does not need to make anyone an atheist. A religion that has been made moderate does the same work, and is more amusing to watch.
A Name of God	Theology Proper	Argument	40	100%	15	The prayer names Him — one of the names God gives himself in Scripture, drawn at random. The name chosen sets how hard it lands and what kind of force it carries. (See NAMES_OF_GOD for the pool.)
A New People	History	Argument	80	100%	10	Aristides has just spent a chapter describing how Christians live, and this is his verdict on it. He is a philosopher reporting to an emperor, and the report is that something has appeared in the world that was not there before.
A Path Between Two Ditches	Allegory	Argument	84	100%	15	A summary, not a quotation. Andrew Wheat describes Lewis’s pilgrim as mapping a path between relativist ideology and superstition, treating the Christian life as a quest rather than a set of questions. It is the picture the raft sea keeps asking the reader to walk.
A Perennial River	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	15	One way, many streams. Clement says the road to truth is single and then says that everything true the Greeks ever wrote runs into it — which is a claim about where their learning ENDS, not a claim that any road will do.
A Place for Strangers	Ethics	Argument	78	100%	10	Famine emptied Caesarea in 369 and Basil sold his inheritance to feed it. Then he built: a hospital, a hostel for travellers, workshops, and a house for lepers. People called the whole complex the Basiliad. A provincial governor was told the bishop had overreached, and this letter is what came back.
A Presumption of Millions to One	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Before you hear the evidence, every particular fact is wildly unlikely — Caesar included. Butler grants that freely and then asks the only question that was ever in dispute: how much MORE unlikely a miracle is than any other unheard-of event, and whether the proof offered is enough to carry it.
A Probable Opinion	Ethics	Argument	72	100%	99	You may do the thing that is probably wrong and probably the more dangerous, so long as one respected authority somewhere has called it allowable. A single doctor’s opinion is enough to make you safe.
A Remnant of Greatness	Anthropology	Argument	70	100%	15	The other half of the diagnosis, and the hopeful half. The restlessness is not only a fault — it is a memory of having been made for something.
A Right to Think for Myself	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	99	The first move of the young sceptic. He is right that he has a right, and the game agrees with him. The trouble comes when he uses the right to take away the very reasons he had for using it.
A Schoolmaster to Christ	Rationality	Argument	80	100%	10	Paul calls the Law a schoolmaster that brought Israel to Christ. Clement says Greek philosophy did the same job for the Greeks — real teaching, real preparation, and never the destination.
A Seed of Religion	Anthropology	Argument	76	100%	15	And immediately the honest half, which is why it is not a cheap argument: the seed is in everyone and it comes to nothing in almost everyone. Hardly one in a hundred cherishes it, and not one brings it to fruit.
A Sign Not Common to All	Christology	Argument	80	95%	8	Justin’s answer to Trypho: an ordinary birth needs no sign, and God said he would give one.
A Sign of a Sign	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	99	A word points to a meaning, and the meaning is more words, and those point on. Derrida says the chain never ends in something plain. It is a hard argument to answer in a sentence, and it is worth trying.
A Sign of Fellowship in His Death	Soteriology	Argument	56	100%	25	How the confession opens. Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, and a sign to the person baptised of fellowship with Christ in his death and resurrection.
A Sin of Both	History	Argument	86	100%	10	Refuses the question of who started it. A Reformed historian looked at eight hundred years of this and declined to hand either side the win.
A Slave by Nature	Ethics	Argument	65	100%	99	Not an aside — the conclusion of a sustained argument, Politics Book 1, chapters 3–7. Aristotle means every word of it.
A Stranger in the World	History	Argument	74	100%	15	Before the argument starts, a plain reminder: being hated is not evidence, and a loud charge is not a true one. The truth has been shouted down in every century.
A Sudden and Miraculous Grace	Eschatology	Argument	90	100%	10	Tolkien’s own word for the turn in a story where everything was lost and then it is not: eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe. It is a grace that cannot be counted on, and it is what he wanted a good ending to do.
A System in Disguise	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	Bavinck saw pragmatism coming and named its trick. It offers itself as a plain method for getting things done, and then turns out to carry a theory of what is real and what is true. Rorty’s grandfather claimed to have no theory. He had one.
A Thinking Reed	Anthropology	Argument	86	95%	10	The most quoted sentence Pascal wrote, and the one that holds his whole anthropology: we are crushable, and we are the only thing in the wreck that understands it.
A Transcendent God, a Transcendental Method	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	15	Van Til says his method is not the old proofs from Aquinas or Anselm and does not try to be. It works from anything at all, and asks what it would take for that thing to make sense.
A Treacherous Schoolmistress	Anthropology	Argument	68	100%	99	You believe what you were raised to believe, and mistake the habit for a conclusion. Custom slips its authority in gently, then rules you with a face you dare not meet.
A Trick of the Row	History	Argument	90	100%	10	The religions of the world are printed in parallel columns and the founders listed in a row: Christ, Mahomet, Buddha, Confucius. Chesterton says the row is a trick of the eye. Put things side by side and they look alike. Look at them closely and they are not the same kind of thing.
A Uniform Experience Against It	Presupposition	Argument	96	95%	99	Hume’s definition does the work before the argument begins. Call nothing a miracle unless experience is uniformly against it, say that uniform experience is proof, and the case is closed by definition, without looking at any report.
A Union Outside Revelation	Faith	Argument	92	100%	99	Barth’s definition of what he is refusing. Natural theology is the claim that we can be joined to God by some road other than Jesus Christ. He says any such road is a road that does not lead there.
A Unique Thing, and a Supernatural One	History	Argument	86	100%	10	Chesterton’s claim for his whole book. When Christianity appeared among the pagans it looked like nothing else, and the more you study it the less it resembles anything it is compared with.
A Vague Notion of Salvation	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	10	Johan Herman Bavinck, Herman’s nephew, asked what every religion is reaching for. His answer is that people have always felt a weight on human life that has no name, and a sense that there must be a rescue from it.
A Whole Nation’s Memory	History	Argument	60	100%	99	The Rabbi’s method, and the book’s whole argument in one move: ground belief in what a nation watched together, not in one man’s report of what he alone was shown.
A Wise Man Proportions	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	15	Hume’s rule, and a good one: believe a thing as strongly as the evidence supports it, and no more. Christians say the same.
A World to Win	Eschatology	Argument	96	100%	99	The end of the story, and it is an end — the last struggle, after which struggle stops. A heaven with the transcendence taken out and the date brought forward.
Above Reason, Not Against It	Rationality	Argument	92	100%	10	A mystery is not a contradiction. There is a boundary to what has been revealed, and it is not the boundary of what makes sense. Reason under revelation reads what God has said; reason over it rules in advance on what God is allowed to have said.
Accommodate Christianity to the Age	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	99	Rorty is an unbeliever, and he is glad when churches try to fit their faith to modern science and modern culture. He is not being unkind. He is describing a plan he thinks will work.
Ad Hominem	Lie	Argument	35	55%	15	Attack the person, not the argument. Lands rarely, and even landed it costs the arguer some standing.
Adam Harmed Only Adam	Lie	Argument	66	100%	99
Administer, Optimize, Multiply	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	99	Modern power does not mostly kill. It counts, measures and improves. Foucault calls this biopower, and the charge is that a state which looks after your health has also taken charge of your life.
Aeons of Barbelo	Allegory	Argument	60	85%	15	Esoterica no fisherman preached.
Affirm	—	Status	—	—	1	Pick the part of the opponent’s case that is true and affirm it. That point can no longer be used against you, and the opponent’s Defend falls sharply. It deals no damage. Affirm something false and you have only agreed with an error.
After All We Can Do	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	One of the best-known verses in the book. It names grace, and then puts the reader’s own work in front of it.
Against the Whole World	History	Argument	74	95%	15	The argument from everyone else, made by envoys who had not come to debate. It is honest about the numbers, and it proves nothing about whether the thing is true.
All of Common Life	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	15	Law’s definition of devotion. It is not a set of prayers kept apart from the rest of the day. It is the whole day given to God, the work and the meals included.
All of the Spiritual Estate	Ecclesiology	Argument	88	100%	10	Takes down the first wall by denying the two-tier map it stands on. There are not spiritual people and ordinary people. There is one baptism and a division of labour.
All Our Efforts, Mere Weakness	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	99	The same argument turned on worship itself: if speech cannot reach God's essence, even praise is admitted failure before it opens its mouth.
All the World My Parish	Ecclesiology	Argument	84	100%	12	Wesley’s answer to bishops who said he had no parish and no right to preach in anyone else’s.
All Truth Is of God	Natural Theology	Argument	80	100%	15	On Romans 1:19. Whatever is true, however a person came to it, came from God. He planted first ideas in the mind that lead it toward him. So a Christian can honour a true thing wherever he finds it.
“All’s Right”	Experience	Argument	74	100%	99	His actual target, named outright: not Scripture, but the philosophers’ own confidence that a good world could not possibly contain a Lisbon.
Allegory of the Cave	Allegory	Argument	55	100%	15	Shadows on a wall, mistaken for the world.
"Almah Means Young Woman"	Exegesis	Argument	55	100%	99	Trypho’s own objection, unchanged in nineteen centuries: the Hebrew word is almah, and almah is a young woman, not necessarily a virgin.
Alternative Spaces of Salvation	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	99	Salvation stops being one thing. The Christian, Muslim and Buddhist ways become different roads to one fulfilment, so none of them can say the others are wrong. That includes the one this reader has been walking since the first hour.
Always The Same	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	99	Tindal argues that an unchanging God and an unchanging human nature can only owe each other one unchanging duty. It is a real argument, but it assumes in advance that God could never say anything new.
An Absolute Falsehood	History	Argument	95	100%	5	New York, 21 October 1888. Margaret Fox, one of the two girls whose knocking began Spiritualism, stood on a stage and showed how she had made the sounds with the joints of her toes. A year later, poor and ill, she took the confession back.
An Alien Righteousness	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	Luther’s own word for it. The righteousness that saves is somebody else’s — fulfilled by Christ, credited to people who did not do it. Foreign, and therefore secure: what was never yours to earn is never yours to lose.
An Answer Without Horns	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	99	The court refuses the distinction. No qualifications, no classes of books, no yes-but. A round and direct answer, and it has already decided which one it is going to hear.
An Enlightened Mind	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10	Chauncy does not say that feelings are wicked. He says they must never be in charge, and that a man ruled by his feelings has stopped acting like a man. The rest of the Old Light case follows from this.
An Eternal Present	Theology Proper	Argument	95	95%	5	God is not stretched out along time, remembering and waiting as the reader does. He holds the whole of unending life at once, in one present. That is what the word “eternal” means.
An Exalted Father	Anthropology	Argument	98	95%	99	Freud says every god is a father made large, and every prayer is a child still asking. Explain where the longing came from and you have explained religion. He had watched people mean it.
An Individual Substance	Christology	Argument	85	100%	10	The sentence every later argument about Christ — and, centuries on, every argument about what a person even is — was built from. Boethius pins it: a person is one particular thing, and a rational one.
An Infinite Chaos	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	15	Sets the table before the bet. Neither side can reach the other by proof — and Pascal says so first, out loud, rather than pretending to a certainty he has not got.
An Unseen Order	Experience	Argument	88	100%	99	James’ working definition of religion, stripped of every doctrine: a felt conviction that something more is there, and that the good life is fitting yourself to it. Broad enough to hold every faith, and by design it decides nothing about which one is true.
Anachronism	History	Argument	45	100%	20	The forger’s fingerprints.
Anachronism Is Evidence	History	Argument	78	100%	15	A document that knows things it could not have known is dated by them. The Donation grants fiefs, calls governors satraps, and names Constantinople a patriarchate — the city Constantine had not yet built. The Latin is the evidence.
Anathema Maranatha	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	99	The operative clause of the bull. It names one man and his party, not a church — and it still broke Christendom.
Ancestral Custom	History	Argument	55	100%	99
Ancient Text Expertise	History	Argument	60	100%	15	Deep familiarity with an old text is a real skill, earned by years in strange manuscripts — and it settles nothing about whether the text is true.
Answer the Catholic	Ethics	Argument	52	100%	10	The reply opens by promoting the man who attacked him. He wrote for a fool; a believer answered; so he will answer the believer. Very likely to take the force out of the foe’s Contend.
Antecedent to Experience	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Hume has trust in testimony built up out of experience, weighed and discounted like any other inference. Campbell points at the order it actually happens in: a child believes first and learns to doubt afterwards, and the doubting is what experience teaches, not the believing.
Appeal for Concord	Ecclesiology	Argument	45	100%	20	Clement to Corinth: order and humility. May steady the reader’s own Defend.
Appeal to the Spirit	Spirituality	Argument	84	100%	10	An argument for Scripture can always be met with a sharper argument. Calvin holds that the case reaches its limit there, and only the Spirit’s own inward witness seals what argument merely prepares the ground for.
Appointed to Be Read	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	10	The other half of the first canon list, and the half nobody quotes. Athanasius fixes twenty-seven books and then names a second shelf — real, useful, handed to new converts, and not Scripture. A church that can say which books are which does not have to burn the rest.
Argument from Design	Natural Theology	Argument	76	100%	10	A made thing argues for its maker. The body stands upright with its senses set high like a garrison; the world goes on being worth looking at long after the workman has gone. Either one is evidence, and neither had to be that way.
Argument from Desire	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	10	Nobody has to be taught to want to be happy, and nothing on offer finishes the wanting. Augustine and Boethius, a century apart, both take the permanent hunger as evidence of where the food is.
Arms and the Man	History	Argument	55	100%	15	Rome’s founding, sung backward from Troy.
As If Setting Out	Eschatology	Argument	72	100%	15	A funeral, described by a stranger who has been watching. They give thanks, and they walk the body out of town the way you walk a friend to the edge of the village when he is going somewhere near. The resurrection is not stated. It is in how they carry him.
As in a Court of Law	Rationality	Argument	62	100%	99	Before a single argument, Julian sets the rules: answer the charge before bringing one of your own. It is fair, but a reader who only ever answers stays on the defensive.
As Natural As A Hammer On Clay	History	Argument	94	100%	12	Hume treats trust in testimony as something built up from experience, weighed and discounted like any other inference. Campbell answers that a child believes what it is told long before it has any experience to weigh it against — testimony is native ground, not a conclusion reasoning ever had to earn.
As Old As Creation	Natural Theology	Argument	92	100%	99	Tindal’s book in one line: whatever God ever required of anyone, he made knowable to everyone from the first man. So Christianity can only be that same original religion, never something added to it.
As on Angels’ Wings	History	Argument	82	100%	15	The theses were posted for a debate that never happened. Then somebody translated them, somebody else printed them without asking, and in a fortnight the argument was in every town in Germany.
As Strongly As Possible	Rationality	Argument	80	100%	15	His translator describes the method of the Oxford treatise. First Vermigli sets out the whole case for transubstantiation, the best the schoolmen had. Then he gives his own reasons, and then he answers their arguments one by one.
"As Though Two Contrary Truths"	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	99	The condemnation’s own language for the error it named — shared here by the bishop who signed it and the school whose teaching it described.
Ascend	Bible	Stat shift	—	100%	10	Take the high ground and argue down from it. Raises the reader’s own Contend sharply — half again what an ordinary lift is worth. Out of doors it climbs what the road will not.
Ask Two Nestorians	History	Argument	58	100%	99	Not an argument from outside the family — an argument from the family's own disagreement, named sect by sect.
Ask with a Sincere Heart	Experience	Argument	88	100%	10	The promise at the end of the book: read it, pray about it, and God will tell you it is true. Many members say this is how they came to believe.
Assertions Contemned	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	10	“Contemned” is old English for scorned, held in contempt. Erasmus said he found firm assertions distasteful and preferred to stay uncertain. Luther answers that no Christian can afford that taste. A religion that will not assert anything as true has already stopped being a religion.
Athens and Jerusalem	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	Tertullian’s most misread sentence. He used philosophy all the time. What he refused was letting people who had abandoned the apostles’ teaching call their speculations Christian.
Authority to Forgive	Christology	Argument	90	100%	8	Jefferson’s razor can cut Jesus’ claim off the page, but not out of the scene. Jesus proves his authority to forgive sins by telling a paralysed man to pick up his mat and walk home. The ethics and the claim come together.
Autonomy and Theonomy	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	Self-rule was supposed to free the creature and instead cut it loose from everything it was related to. Bavinck’s counter-word is theonomy — not a smaller place, a rightful one.
Avarice and Gain	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	15	Grants the mechanism and follows the money anyway. Whatever the rattle does for the dead, here is what it certainly does for the living.
Avoid Custom	Anthropology	Argument	72	100%	10	The strongest reason for the old gods was not an argument. It was that everyone had always done it. Clement answers the habit, because the habit is what keeps people there.
Away From All Suns	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	99	Nietzsche describes what happens when God is taken from the centre: no fixed up or down, nothing to steer by. He says it to people who feel no dizziness at all.
Azymite	History	Argument	70	100%	99	A brand-new insult for a brand-new heresy: the people who bake it wrong. Cerularius invented the word, and a great deal followed from it.
Back to the Grandfathers	History	Argument	80	100%	15	Schaff’s own summary of the difference between the two men, and it is a method rather than a jibe: when the fathers are quoted at you, go and read what the fathers were reading.
Ban and Outlawry	Ecclesiology	Argument	88	100%	99	The sentence itself. No man may shelter him, feed him, or read him; any man may kill him. It was never enforced, because an elector hid him in a castle and let the emperor find out later.
Baptism Has Been Substituted for Circumcision	History	Argument	62	100%	20	The conclusion Calvin draws from that comparison. Circumcision was the Jews’ first entrance into the people of God, and baptism now does the same work for the church.
Be Killing Sin	Ethics	Argument	88	100%	10	Owen’s subject is sin in a believer, and his claim is that it never holds still. Left alone it is not neutral — it is working. So the killing of it is daily, lifelong, done by the Spirit rather than by gritted teeth, because the alternative is being killed by it.
Be Kind to One Another	Ethics	Restore	—	—	10	Kindness, and then forgiveness, all through the backpack — every status effect on your team is washed away.
Bearing the Cross	Spirituality	Argument	74	100%	10	Christian patience is not the Stoic hero who feels nothing. The pain is real and is felt in full; it is borne anyway. That distinction is the move.
Behind the Father’s Back	Lie	Argument	56	100%	99
Believes Where He Pleases	Exegesis	Argument	92	100%	10	Celsus takes the apostles’ trades out of the Gospels and the miracles on the next page out of consideration. Origen names the move: one book, one set of writers, and a reader deciding page by page which of them to credit by what he has already settled to believe.
Better to Be Than to Talk	Ethics	Argument	90	100%	8	The sentence that should worry anybody who has spent a whole game winning arguments. Teaching is a fine thing — on one condition, and Ignatius states the condition in five words.
Beyond the Reach of Nature	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	10	Celsus offers a method — combine, separate, argue by analogy, and arrive at God the way a mathematician arrives at a proof. Origen answers that the errors are the evidence: men have been running that method for centuries and have come out somewhere different every time.
Beyond What Reason Reaches	Faith	Argument	64	100%	15	The first question of the Summa is whether theology should exist at all beside philosophy. The answer sets the limit honestly: some things reason cannot walk to.
Bitter Water Test	History	Argument	45	100%	20	An embellishment far beyond Luke.
Blessed In Hope	Eschatology	Argument	92	100%	10	Augustine spends most of Book 19 showing how little this life can deliver. Then he says a person can be happy now, in hope, because a better life is coming. Someone who thinks this life is all there is has the misery without the hope.
Body and Soul	Anthropology	Argument	60	100%	15	God made humans body AND soul, and judges the whole person — so the whole person must rise. The book steadies itself in its own integrity (Defend may rise).
Born Bound, Not Born Free	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	5	The chains Rousseau blames on society came in with the man. Rebuild every institution around him and the fault is still there, because it was never only in the institutions.
Born Free, Everywhere in Chains	Anthropology	Argument	90	95%	99	Rousseau’s opening, and his whole anthropology is in it: the chains are not native to the man. He came into the world free and good; something outside him — society, property, dogma — put the irons on.
Born in Water	Bible	Argument	20	100%	15	The oldest Christian pun about fish: ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek word for "fish," spells out "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior" letter by letter, and the earliest believers scratched it into stone as a password nobody outside the church could read.
Borrowed from the Cults	History	Argument	98	95%	99	A dying and rising saviour, a sacred meal, initiation by washing. The Hellenistic world was full of all three before anybody preached in Corinth.
Both Claimed the Victory	Rationality	Argument	76	100%	99	Three weeks of Latin, and each side went home saying it had won. Eck went home with honours, favours from Duke George, and a serious try at a cardinal’s hat.
Both Customs	Ecclesiology	Argument	78	100%	15	The answer that was on the table the entire time: leavened and unleavened are both lawful, both holy, and neither is worth a church.
Both Sides Disowned It	Ecclesiology	Argument	84	100%	99	Then the agreement collapsed. Rome rejected it, Wittenberg was cool toward it, and the men who had signed it were left with a paper nobody wanted. Your own side helped break it.
Bound to the Wood	Christology	Argument	88	95%	10	Odysseus had himself lashed to the mast to hear the Sirens and live. Clement takes the picture off Homer and hands it back: there is a mast, it is a cross, and the man tied to it comes home.
Bow to Necessity	Ethics	Argument	64	95%	99	Not hostility — an offer, made by a man who respected him and wanted him to live. One word, retracted, and nothing further happens to you. It is the gentlest form the charge ever took, and gentleness is what makes it hard to answer.
Break the Law, Break the Peace	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	99	The pagans’ best argument, and the man who says it here is the one who then ruled for baptism. A people is its law. Run two laws through it and there is no people left to convert.
Brighter Than Light	Theology Proper	Argument	68	100%	10	God cannot be seen — he is brighter than sight; nor grasped — he is purer than touch. The confident measurer loses the thread.
Brothers by Our Forbearance	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	12	The instruction for an argument you are losing on volume. Answer the wrath with meekness, the boasting with humility, the railing with prayer — and do not be eager to answer in kind, because being answered in kind is what they expect.
Burnt to Ashes	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	10	Thesis 50, and it is written as a defence of the pope rather than an attack on him — which is what makes it land. If he knew what was being done in his name, Luther says, he would rather St Peter’s were ashes. The trade is indefensible even on Rome’s own terms.
But of a Late Time	History	Argument	82	100%	15	Accused of teaching something new, he pointed at the doctrine he was answering. The word transubstantiation was defined at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, twelve centuries after the apostles.
By Divine Right	Ecclesiology	Argument	88	100%	99	The claim Eck came to defend, and he defended it well: the pope holds Peter’s chair by divine right, not by human arrangement, and that is a fact about the church rather than an opinion about it.
By Their Effects	Rationality	Argument	80	100%	10	Reason walks you to the door and stops. Savonarola grants that plainly, and then argues from what the faith has actually done in the world instead of pretending reason went further.
By Virtue of the Absurd	Faith	Argument	92	100%	10	Kierkegaard’s best-known phrase. The knight of faith sees the impossibility with open eyes and does not pretend it away. Then he believes anyway, because to God nothing is impossible.
By What Miracles	Natural Theology	Argument	86	100%	99	A fair demand on its own terms. The apostles’ gospel came with signs; produce yours.
Called as Witness	Rationality	Argument	62	100%	15	Call a witness the room already respects, even one who is no friend of yours. Testimony from someone the accuser trusts cannot be dismissed as special pleading. Sometimes lowers the foe’s Contend.
Called by an Emperor	History	Argument	92	100%	5	Takes down the third wall with a date. If only the pope may call a council, then the council that gave the church its creed was not a council — and everything decided at Nicaea goes with it.
Calmness and Moderation	Ethics	Stat shift	—	100%	10	A bishop’s advice to a missionary about his tone. Ask your questions calmly, and the other man falls quiet from confusion instead of digging in from anger.
Canon IX	Anthropology	Argument	92	100%	99	Trent’s curse on faith alone. Read it carefully: it condemns a faith that needs nothing else and involves no movement of the will. The Reformers answered it anyway.
Case Dismissed	Rationality	Argument	65	100%	10	A move from Roman property law. The church has held these Scriptures since the apostles, so a newcomer has no standing to dispute them. Often lowers the foe’s Contend.
Catalogue of Ships	History	Argument	45	90%	20	An exhaustive muster. Exhausting, too.
Catechetical Charge	Ethics	Argument	70	100%	6	The Didache’s plain moral instruction, pressed home.
Cave Nativity	Allegory	Argument	45	100%	20	Legend loves detail.
Centre Everywhere	Natural Theology	Argument	70	100%	15	A figure old before he used it, turned on nature itself: whatever you measure from, you are not at the middle of it.
Certain Because Impossible	Rationality	Argument	90	90%	5	Nobody invents a god who dies ashamed. Tertullian takes the most embarrassing thing in the story and argues that the embarrassment is the evidence — the reasoning Aristotle used, aimed at a cross.
Chapter and Verse	Bible	Argument	92	100%	10	Numbers down the margin, so a sentence has an address. Before this you cited a book and a chapter and hoped; after it, two people a thousand miles apart can turn to the same line and argue about the same words.
Chapter…	Bible	Scripture	—	—	12	Tier 2. Choose the chapter that answers THIS error — but lean on the same one too often and it wears thin (3 RR per chapter).
Christendom Has Done Away With Christianity	Ecclesiology	Argument	88	100%	10	Kierkegaard’s charge against his own country, where everyone was baptised and counted a Christian. A whole nation had become Christian by habit, and the habit had replaced the thing. His answer is not to give up on the church. It is to bring Christianity back in.
Christianity Is Itself History	History	Argument	90	100%	10	Told that his faith is a product of history, Bavinck answers that it is a maker of history. Christianity arrives, acts and changes things, and that is a claim the historical record can test.
Christianity Preserves the Harmony	Rationality	Argument	92	100%	10	Bavinck’s main claim. Thinking that answers to nothing outside itself swings between opposite errors forever. Peace with God comes first, and everything else follows from it.
Clay Sparrows	Allegory	Argument	45	100%	20	A child’s wonder-tale told as history.
Cleopatra’s Nose	History	Argument	68	100%	15	History turns on things too small to plan for. Pascal uses it against every account of the past that arrives at itself by necessity.
Cogito Ergo Sum	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	99	The one thing the doubt cannot touch: something is doing the doubting. From this single point Descartes proposes to rebuild the whole world — God included.
Come, You Who Are Foolish	Presupposition	Argument	52	100%	99	Celsus’ charge: Christian preachers openly prefer the ignorant to the educated. Celsus thinks this proves that the Christian faith itself is ignorant.
Commit It to the Flames	Presupposition	Argument	92	95%	8	The last paragraph of the Enquiry. Keep mathematics and experiment, and burn everything else. The Enquiry contains neither, so by its own rule it goes on the fire too.
Compassionate and Passionless	Theology Proper	Argument	70	100%	15	Anselm turns on his own doctrine and presses where it seems to contradict itself, instead of asserting past the difficulty.
Condemned His Memory	Ecclesiology	Argument	76	100%	99	The Council of Constance answered Wyclif thirty-one years after he died — by ordering his bones dug up and thrown out of consecrated ground.
Condemned to Be Free	Anthropology	Argument	88	100%	99	Sartre’s hardest phrase. We did not choose to exist, and we are still responsible for everything we do. He calls that being condemned to be free, and he does not say who does the condemning.
Confined Within Limits	Theology Proper	Argument	90	95%	99	The conclusion Julian draws from all of it: a god who looks after one nation is a local god. Demote him to the crowd and the whole claim collapses. Everything hangs on whether the premise was ever true.
Conscience! Divine Instinct	Natural Theology	Argument	80	100%	99	Not an argument so much as an appeal — conscience named as a sense organ for the good, planted and reliable, needing no revelation to correct it because it was never derived from reasoning in the first place.
Consensus	Ecclesiology	Argument	—	100%	5	Not one voice but the whole shelf — every book you carry that answers to the same kind of error as the one in front of you adds its own weight. 25 per matching book through three, then climbing more slowly: 90 at four, 110 at five, 125 at six.
Considered Collectively	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	10	Savonarola will not let the evidence be judged one piece at a time, because nobody weighs a person that way. Any one work can be shrugged off. Set them side by side, he says, and see what is left.
Considered Separately, Joined Together	Natural Theology	Argument	90	100%	10	Butler asks for both halves of the work. Examine each claim on its own, then put them back together, because the strength of the case is in how they fit, which no single piece can show.
Contradiction	Lie	Argument	50	100%	20	The text undercuts itself. A wild book shrugs this off — in YOUR hands, the wound is yours.
Contrivance Must Have Had a Contriver	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Suppose the watch was made by another watch, and that one by a third. Paley grants the whole chain and points out what it has not done: every machine in it still shows the fitting of parts to a purpose, and moving the question back a step has never once answered it.
Copied Out in Gold	Bible	Argument	68	100%	15	Boniface asked for Peter’s letters written in gold, so that when he held the book up before people who could not read, the book itself would impress them.
Count the Christians	History	Argument	78	100%	99	A second turn of the same screw. However the argument went, the great majority of Christians alive have never agreed with you — and novelty is not nothing when the claim is catholicity.
Counted Worthy	Spirituality	Type shift	—	—	10	Paul stops arguing and prays for the people he is writing to. Greatly raises the user’s Contend.
Court the Crowd	Experience	Type shift	—	—	99
Created or Uncreated	Natural Theology	Argument	70	100%	15	A dilemma with only two doors, and one of them opens on God. Everything that exists was made or was not; whatever was made needs a maker; the regress has to stop.
Cross-Reference	Ecclesiology	Team restore	—	—	10	Every book still on its feet lends the next one a footnote. Restores 12 Stamina to every book in your party that hasn’t been spent.
Cultivate Our Garden	Ethics	Argument	70	100%	15	The last line of Candide. He stops arguing about providence and goes to work. Pangloss points out that Adam was put in Eden to work the ground, and Candide does not answer him.
Custom Is Our Nature	Anthropology	Argument	62	100%	20	A warning aimed at his own side. Most of what a man calls conviction he got by habit, and habit will hold a false thing exactly as firmly.
Dark for the Consistent	Anthropology	Argument	84	100%	15	The line that explains why the previous move hurts. To be consistent in a view that has no place for God, a person must deny what is really there, in this life and the next. Schaeffer says it is dark there, and he does not enjoy saying it.
Darken the Truth or Teach Falsely	Ethics	Argument	88	100%	10	His letter home to the church at Lucca, written from Strasbourg in January 1543. He fled Italy because staying meant preaching less than he believed, or preaching what he knew was false. Flight is not denial. He kept teaching the same gospel from the other side of the Alps.
Deeds Are a Tongue	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	15	People said they could attend the Mass with their bodies while their hearts stayed Protestant. The treatise answers that God is Lord of the body too. What you do in worship says something, just as your words do.
Deficient, Not Efficient	Rationality	Argument	86	100%	10	Asked what caused the first bad will, Augustine refuses to invent an answer. A cause makes something happen, but a bad will is something failing to happen. Looking for its cause is like trying to see darkness or hear silence.
Define Terms	Lie	Type shift	—	25%	15	Insist on a precise definition before answering. Rarely goes anywhere — but when it does, the delay steadies the arguer.
Delight in the Poems of the Arabs	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	10	Not a complaint about doctrine — a diagnosis of what actually happened to a generation. The brightest young Christians in Córdoba could write elegant Arabic verse and could not manage a plain letter in their own tongue. Nobody argued them out of the faith. Nothing had to.
Delivered and Received	History	Argument	72	100%	10	Paul is not composing here. He is handing on something he was handed — a creed already old when he wrote it down.
Denied Messiah	Lie	Argument	55	100%	15	It refutes itself in two languages.
Departed from the Errors	Ecclesiology	Argument	90	100%	5	The schism answer, put precisely enough to be argued with. Leaving an error inside a body is not leaving the body — and the errors left first.
Depraved Custom	Ethics	Argument	88	100%	5	Answers "everyone has always done it this way" by asking what everyone doing it proves. Numbers do not make a thing right; they only settle how many are carried off by it.
Deserters, and Gladly	History	Argument	88	100%	10	The charge is that Christians are traitors twice over — Greeks who abandoned the Greeks, borrowers who will not keep the Jewish law they borrowed from. Eusebius does not deny one word of it. He concedes the whole indictment in his first pages and spends fifteen books arguing that leaving was right.
Design Must Have Had a Designer	Natural Theology	Argument	92	100%	10	Twenty-two chapters of eyes, ears, joints and valves, and then the shortest paragraph in the book. Paley does not claim the inference is subtle. He claims it is unavoidable, and says so in two sentences.
Devout Man Only	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
Diagonalization	Biblical Theology	Argument	85	100%	5	The biblical refusal of false opposites: what the world splits in two, Scripture holds together. A method the great books share.
Did the Apostles Take Tithes?	Ecclesiology	Argument	78	100%	10	Two questions, and the second is the one that stings. Where in the apostles is a tithe collected from a new convert — and how hard do we, raised in the faith, find it to pay ours?
Die, or Fly	Ethics	Argument	86	100%	15	Under persecution the treatise gives two honest choices, and pretending is not one of them. A believer who has confessed the gospel may flee for it, or die for it. He may not stay and act as if he never believed it.
Dipping Is Not Necessary	Ecclesiology	Argument	64	100%	15	The Westminster Confession on the mode. Baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling. It is the one clause in the chapter its Baptist neighbour contradicts word for word.
Directing the Intention	Ethics	Argument	76	100%	99	When the deed cannot be prevented, purify the motive instead. Point the will at some allowable object — defending your honour, say, rather than revenge — and the same act comes out clean.
Distinction, Not Division	Theology Proper	Argument	75	100%	10	Three is a count of persons, not of gods. Tertullian says the Father, the Son and the Spirit are distinct from one another and are never divided, because they share one substance.
Distortion	Lie	Argument	45	100%	99
Diversion	Anthropology	Argument	72	100%	15	Why nobody sits still. We are not distracted because life is dull; we distract ourselves because sitting still means noticing what we are.
Do as I Do	Experience	Status	—	90%	15	The first night, Kate Fox clapped her hands and told whatever was knocking to copy her. It did. The room was never quite sure what it had heard after that.
Do I Eat the Flesh of Bulls?	Bible	Argument	56	100%	15	The oldest surviving copy of the Greek Psalms has this on it, and it is God asking the question. He is not the one who was hungry. May convict the foe.
Doctrine Before Miracles	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	5	Puts the two in the right order and the demand collapses. A wonder cannot certify a teaching, because wonders attend lies too; the teaching is examined first, and only then may a sign confirm it.
Doctrines of Demons	Ecclesiology	Argument	64	100%	15	The warning is not that error might come. It is that it will, from inside, and on a schedule. The foe may be left DISTRACTED.
Doing Justice, Loving Mercy	Ethics	Argument	78	100%	15	Paine’s creed borrows the words of Micah 6:8. Micah’s verse has three parts, and Paine keeps two of them.
Doubtful About Himself, Sure of the Truth	Anthropology	Argument	82	100%	15	A man is supposed to be humble about himself and confident about what is true. Chesterton says the age has turned that round. People are now sure of themselves and unsure whether anything is true.
Doubtful and Uncertain	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	99	You have no court. Every man reads the book for himself and gets a different answer, and you call the sum of that certainty.
Each Party’s Own Religion	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	15	Bayle’s key argument. If compel them to come in allows force for the sake of truth, it allows force for anyone sincerely sure they have the truth, and that is every persecutor on every side. So the verse cannot mean that.
Economy	Exegesis	Argument	55	100%	15	Grasp the author’s arrangement of the whole story and a scrambled argument loses its thread. Restore each line to its proper place and the forgery destroys itself. May leave the foe DISTRACTED.
Either Nothing or Owed	Rationality	Type shift	—	—	99
Embarrassing That God Does Not Exist	Anthropology	Argument	94	100%	99	Not many unbelievers say this out loud. Sartre says the honest existentialist finds it an embarrassment that God is absent, because with him goes every good that stands above us. He does not soften what he thinks follows.
Embassy	History	Argument	50	100%	20	Athenagoras’ open letter to the emperors: Christians are no atheists — they pray for the state and seek a quiet, obedient life. Rome could ask for no better subjects.
Emptied, Not Changed	Theology Proper	Argument	70	100%	10	The objection is that God cannot change and so cannot come down. Origen answers that the Word never stopped being what he was: he took the form of a servant without laying down the form of God.
Epicycles	Rationality	Argument	60	90%	15	Circles upon circles. Wrong about the center; right for a thousand years of predictions.
Equal Crown for All	Ethics	Argument	45	100%	15	Every baptized Christian stands equal before God — the virgin gains no higher crown than the faithful wife, and fasting earns no more than thanksgiving.
Even the Little Finger	Faith	Argument	90	100%	99	Barth’s warning to anyone tempted to give reason a small role. Give it a finger, he says, and it takes the hand. He wrote it against those who, in his own century, put a second source of revelation beside Christ.
Every Creed Kills	History	Argument	88	95%	99	The post-war charge, and there is a graveyard behind it: a third of the German lands dead over whose church was the true one. The tract’s conclusion is that doctrine itself is the danger, and the cure is to stop taking any of it seriously.
Every Fortune Is Good	Rationality	Argument	86	95%	10	The hard case put to Boethius in the cell: the wicked flourish, the just are broken. His answer is that no lot is simply bad — each one rewards, tests, corrects, or gives what is deserved, and so is either useful or just. A philosopher’s theodicy, not the whole of one; but a real answer.
Every Man His Own Parish	Ecclesiology	Argument	82	100%	15	The complaint that is not about feelings at all. Travelling preachers were entering settled parishes uninvited, telling congregations their own minister was unconverted, and riding on. Whole churches split behind them. Chauncy had watched it happen and thought no revival was worth it.
Every Nation Keeps These	Ethics	Argument	76	100%	99	Julian reads the Ten Commandments aloud and then asks what is new in them. Do not kill, do not steal, honour your parents — every nation punishes those already. Strip out the first commandment and the sabbath, he says, and Sinai told the world nothing it did not know.
Every Prophet’s Voice	Bible	Argument	800	100%	5	Not an argument. Isaiah, seven centuries early, and the book does not raise its voice to say it.
Every Raft at Once	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	99	The Flotilla speaks with every voice it carries: Hick’s kindness, Rorty’s shrug, Foucault’s suspicion, Derrida’s doubt, Lyotard’s refusal. Any one can be answered. All together they sound like the age itself.
Every Wind of Doctrine	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	Name the trick out loud — the drift, the craftiness, the practised shift of ground — and it stops working. The foe may find its Contend fallen.
Everything Except His Reason	Anthropology	Argument	90	100%	10	The madman, Chesterton says, is not a man who has lost his reason. He has kept it and lost everything else: the sense of proportion, the humour, the sense that he might be wrong. A theory can be complete, unanswerable and mad.
Everything That Begins	Natural Theology	Argument	90	100%	10	Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. So the universe has a cause. Al-Ghazali argued that an endless past could never be crossed to reach today, so whatever began the world stands outside time. Christians can use his argument too.
Everywhere Tears	Ecclesiology	Argument	85	100%	10	Not an argument. A patriarch on his knees to another patriarch, telling him exactly what it will cost, eleven months before it costs it.
Evil Is From Demons	Presupposition	Argument	55	100%	15	Justin’s diagnosis of persecution: the pagan gods are demons, and it is they who drive the courts and rulers against the Christians.
Exalted Creature	Lie	Argument	55	100%	99
Except We Use Figures	Exegesis	Argument	84	100%	15	His opponents said that if Scripture may speak in figures, heretics will twist everything. Vermigli turned it round. The Bible says the rock was Christ and the seed is the word, and a reader who takes every figure literally hands the heretics the win.
Excised Without Mercy	Faith	Argument	94	100%	99	The strongest sentence in the Nein! tradition. Natural theology should not be argued with. It should be cut out, because it has no place in preaching or in theology at all.
Exhortation to Wisdom	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	20	Cicero wrote a book urging young men to stop chasing careers and chase wisdom instead. It worked on exactly one reader we can name, and it changed everything downstream of him.
Existence Precedes Essence	Anthropology	Argument	90	100%	99	The slogan of a whole movement, and here it is in full. A paper knife has a purpose before it exists. A human being, Sartre says, has none: he turns up first and decides afterwards what he is.
Explain the Death	Soteriology	Argument	102	95%	8	Grant every critical result. You are still left with a crucifixion, and with men who watched it and died saying it had saved them. An account that explains the documents but not that has missed the main thing.
Expose Contradictions	Rationality	Status	—	100%	15	Turn the accusers’ own charges against one another until the argument contradicts itself — and FREEZES, unable to reply. Hard to land; lasting when it does.
Eyewitness Appeal	History	Argument	40	100%	25	Public facts, publicly checkable — no rhetorical fog can blur them.
Fails To Be Benefited	Soteriology	Argument	60	100%	25	The honest edge of Augustine’s case. Baptism does not finish the matter. A baptised infant who grows up and does not believe, he says, gains nothing from what he received as a child.
Faith Kept in Reserve	Natural Theology	Argument	76	100%	99	Descartes sets revealed truth aside as too high for reason, then lets reason work on everything else and arrive at a God of its own making. He keeps the living God on a shelf instead of listening to him.
Faith Kept in the Heart	Ecclesiology	Argument	84	100%	15	Some said faith in the heart is enough and saying it aloud is optional. The sermon answers with Jesus: whoever confesses me before men. A faith kept wholly inside has not been confessed at all.
Faith Only, Gathered	Soteriology	Argument	88	100%	10	Rome said the word only is not in the Bible. Vermigli agreed, and said it does not need to be. Paul says we are justified freely, without works, by grace and not by works, and faith only is what those sentences mean.
Faith Seeking Reason	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	15	Reason is the faculty God gave us; refusing it insults the giver. Faith is not the alternative to understanding — it is the framework inside which understanding can work. May steady the reader’s own Defend.
Falseness Is No Objection	Presupposition	Argument	102	90%	99	The move that ends the argument you thought you were having. He grants that the belief is false and asks why you imagined that was the question — the only question is what a belief does for the creature holding it.
Far Above Every Name	Christology	Argument	80	95%	10	The power that raised Christ and seated him above every rule and authority — named, and then aimed.
Farewell, My Throne	Ecclesiology	Argument	76	100%	15	Constantinople, 381. Gregory had been brought in to win the council and his own seat became the thing the bishops were fighting about, so he resigned in the middle of it and preached this on the way out. The book’s own Defend may rise as it says so.
Fashioned Out of Nothing	Theology Proper	Argument	64	100%	15	Sixteen chapters of taking Rome’s case apart, and then Tertullian finally says what he is FOR. One God, who made the whole mass of it out of nothing, for no reason but his own glory.
Father of History	History	Argument	50	100%	20	Inquiry — historia — so that great deeds not be forgotten.
Fear at the Bottom	Anthropology	Argument	90	100%	99	The genealogy of religion in one stroke: it is the terror of the unknown plus the wish for a protector, and nothing else needs explaining. Felt, and meant to be felt.
Fictional Story	Allegory	Story	—	100%	20	A charming legend. Everyone relaxes a little — which helps the teller most.
Fifteen Books Against You	Lie	Argument	65	95%	99
First Made Them Disciples	Exegesis	Argument	64	100%	20	Gill’s argument from the order of the Great Commission. Disciples are made first and baptised second. He reads that order as a rule about who is to be baptised.
First Principles	Theology Proper	Argument	70	95%	10	One God in both Testaments; a real human Jesus; the Son eternally begotten; three persons, one God — set out in order, decades before a council had to say it in Greek.
First, Listen	Natural Theology	Argument	86	100%	15	Bavinck’s method in one instruction. After looking around and reflecting on what people do, stop and listen to what God says about it. The order matters: look honestly at religion, and then let God’s word judge what you saw.
Fishers of Men	Bible	Argument	20	100%	15	Four fishermen on a lake, told their actual trade was about to change shape rather than end.
Five Hundred Witnesses	History	Argument	88	100%	10	Not one man’s word against the world — a named number, most of them alive and askable when the claim was first published, in the very city where checking it was a walk across town.
Fly	Bible	Stat shift	—	100%	10	The bird carries the book and the book carries you. In a debate it puts the argument out of reach: the reader’s Defend rises sharply, half again an ordinary lift. Out of doors, open the Itinerary and name a place you have already been.
Follies, Falsehoods, Charlatanisms	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	99	Jefferson’s own account of the surgery: keep the ethics, because they are sublime; cut everything else away, because the biographers — not Jesus — are the ones he holds responsible for the rest.
Force and Truth Together	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	99	Foucault’s word for a system that punishes and certifies in one motion. The court that sentences a man is also the court that says what the facts are. Nobody stands outside it to check either.
Form Without Matter	Natural Theology	Argument	80	100%	10	A statue is a statue by its form, not its bronze; earth is earth by dryness and weight, not by bare stuff. Follow that up: the one thing with no matter under it at all is not made of anything. It simply IS what it is.
Fountains of Salvation	Bible	Argument	92	100%	5	Easter 367. The bishop of Alexandria lists the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, in the order the church still has them, and then draws the line around them out loud — the first surviving time anyone does.
Four Sources	Biblical Theology	Argument	96	95%	99	The Pentateuch is not one book but four, stitched together late and badly, and the seams are visible to anybody who will look at them honestly.
Free Men From That Load	Natural Theology	Argument	84	100%	99	Tindal does not attack the gospel. He demotes it. Revelation adds nothing reason had not already given everyone; its only job is to clear away what priests added.
From His Mouth the Truth	Ecclesiology	Argument	82	100%	10	Four hundred prophets on one side and Micaiah on the other, and the church was where the truth was. An answer to "where was your church" that does not need a building to point at.
From One Blood	Bible	Argument	92	100%	10	Paul says it on the Areopagus, to Greeks who kept a longer chronology than his own: one origin, one family, one fall, and one Redeemer for the whole of it. The wider map does not need a second Adam.
From Self-Centred to Reality-Centred	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	99	Hick’s test for a true faith is what it does to a person. Does it turn a self-centred life toward the Real? By that test the great faiths come out level, and the argument between them looks like a quarrel about words.
From the Crude to the Refined	Biblical Theology	Argument	104	90%	99	Religion develops in one direction — from the local and the bloody toward the ethical and the universal. Date every passage by where it sits on that line.
From the Documents	History	Argument	84	100%	10	Eusebius copied his evidence in rather than summarising it — letters, imperial edicts, lists of bishops, whole treatises by men whose books are otherwise gone. Most of what anybody knows about the first three centuries survives because he pasted it into this one.
From the Head to the Members	Ecclesiology	Argument	70	95%	15	A duke explaining why he is baptised first and his province follows. He knows the early church did it the other way round, and says so. Much of northern Europe was converted this way, which is one reason its faith often stayed thin.
From What Is Made	Natural Theology	Argument	62	100%	15	Creation and conscience get you some way toward God on their own. Scripture then confirms what they could only gesture at — Origen is careful never to claim more than that.
From Your Own Gospels	Exegesis	Argument	62	100%	99	Abd al-Jabbar argued from what the Gospels actually say, not from rumours about them. He had read the book, which made him both courteous and dangerous.
Fruits, Not Roots	Experience	Argument	84	100%	99	James’ rule, which he credits to Edwards: judge a religious experience by what it produces, not by where it came from. It sounds like Matthew 7, but James has ruled the roots out on principle.
Galatia Went Amiss	History	Argument	84	100%	10	An argument made entirely out of the New Testament’s own mail. Paul wrote to churches he had planted to tell them they had gone wrong. Name the church that was promised it could not.
General and Special Revelation	Biblical Theology	Argument	88	100%	15	Bavinck’s answer to where religion starts: not a faculty found by looking inward, but God making himself known. He speaks first through creation and conscience, to everyone, and then through his word, beginning with the call of Abraham.
Give Back More Than You Take	Ethics	Argument	82	100%	10	The answer to you are only here for the money. Want nothing of theirs, give back more than they give you, and let the accounts prove it.
Give What You Command	Soteriology	Argument	84	100%	10	Augustine’s prayer that scandalized Pelagius.
God by Grace	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
God Does Not Accept the Age	History	Argument	60	100%	20	The council’s reason. God does not favour persons, and so he does not favour an age. He is a Father to everyone, and with an even hand when it comes to grace.
God Felt by the Heart	Faith	Argument	76	100%	10	The definition that follows from it. Faith is not a conclusion you are argued into; it is God known by the faculty that knows persons.
God Has Permitted This	Rationality	Argument	80	100%	99	A Muslim argument, reported by the peace-party Christians as ammunition against their own Zealots. If God meant to vindicate you, He would have worked a sign — and instead your dead are burned and your movement has cost you nothing but grief.
God Is Dead	Ethics	Argument	96	100%	99	The madman with a lantern at noon, and the crowd of unbelievers laughing — because they have not grasped what they did. Nietzsche is not gloating here. He is the only one in the market who is frightened.
God Is Happiness	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10	The last link of a chain: the source of all good can have nothing better than itself, so it is the highest good — and the highest good has already been shown to be happiness. Therefore God does not HAVE happiness. He is it.
God Is Not Wordless	Theology Proper	Argument	72	100%	10	Reason its way toward the Trinity instead of asserting it: a God who is living and rational was never without his Word, and a Word with no beginning is not a creature.
God Is There	Anthropology	Argument	90	100%	10	Schaeffer’s order for telling the gospel to a modern person. The first line is not a request to accept Christ. It is the plain claim that God is there. Nothing after it makes sense to a listener who has not heard that first.
God Makes All Things Good	Natural Theology	Argument	82	100%	12	The first line of Émile. Rousseau raises his pupil away from society to keep him good, because he thinks the child starts out good and society spoils him.
God Speaks to Your Eyes	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	10	Berkeley’s answer to the absent clockmaker. What we see works like a language: signs that tell us what to expect and how to act. If a voice proves a speaker, so does this.
God, Like a Theorem	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	99	God’s existence is contained in the idea of a perfect being the way a triangle’s angles are contained in the idea of a triangle. Proved on the page, like geometry — and about as warm.
God’s Wheat	Faith	Argument	94	95%	5	The most famous sentence any of the apostolic fathers wrote, and it is a request. Ignatius is writing AHEAD of himself to Rome, to beg the Christians there not to use their influence to save his life.
God’s Word Arouseth Insurrection	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	10	The oldest reason given for keeping the Bible out of ordinary hands: that people who read it will not stay quiet. Tyndale had heard it too, and answered it by naming it.
Gods Under Guard	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	15	Aristides walks past a temple and notices the lock. If a god has to be kept safe from thieves, the guard is stronger than the god — and the man who carved it is stronger still. A child can check this argument, which is why it has never worn out.
Golden Mean	Ethics	Argument	50	100%	20	Virtue as the middle path between excess and defect.
Good News That Is True News	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	15	One sentence that no honest evangelist can get round. There is nothing worth announcing if it is only comforting. It has to be true, or it is not news.
Grace Is Only Example	Lie	Argument	68	100%	99
Grace Perfects Nature	Rationality	Argument	68	100%	15	Reason is not faith’s rival and not its replacement — it is the thing faith takes up and uses. The book’s own Defend may rise as it says so.
Greater Than Can Be Conceived	Theology Proper	Argument	76	100%	10	The argument turns and goes past its own conclusion: not merely the greatest thing thinkable, but greater than thinking reaches.
Half-Truth	Lie	Argument	55	95%	99
Handed Over, Line by Line	Ecclesiology	Argument	56	100%	20	Cyril taught the creed to people who were not allowed to write it down — clause by clause, through Lent, until they could give it back. May convict the foe.
"Hatred of Mankind"	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
Have Not Grown Weary	Faith	Argument	60	100%	15	Endurance is the thing being commended, so the move is worth most when there is least left. Strikes half again as hard when the book is nearly spent.
He Chose Out One Nation	Exegesis	Argument	78	100%	99	The setup for the charge, and Julian states it accurately. Moses does say this. What Moses also says — that the one nation was chosen so that all the families of the earth would be blessed — Julian leaves out.
"He Could Have Fallen"	Lie	Argument	70	100%	99
He Engrafts Even Baptized Infants	Soteriology	Argument	66	100%	20	Augustine’s argument from infants. A baby cannot imitate anyone, so if it is joined to Christ it must be by grace and not by example. He sets that against Pelagius, who taught that Adam harmed his children only by example.
He Is a Gentleman	Anthropology	Argument	70	100%	99	The honnête-homme creed — and Pascal held it too. In this mouth it is a wall: to be nothing in particular, pleasant company, is the whole of a life, and there is no need to look past it.
"He Only Seemed"	Lie	Argument	50	100%	99
He Rode Slowly On His Way	Faith	Argument	82	100%	15	Kierkegaard retells Genesis 22. Abraham does not rush and does not dawdle. He saddles a donkey and rides up the mountain with a knife and his son, believing God will not take Isaac and ready to give him if God does.
He Truly Suffered	Christology	Argument	60	100%	15	If he only seemed to suffer, martyrs die for a phantom.
He Went Up, So He Went Down	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	10	Start from what the other man already grants and follow it where it goes. He was taken up — so he had died, and the death was the one the prophets described.
Heard Before Condemned	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	Tertullian asks the governors for one thing before anything else: do not sentence what you have not troubled to hear. A hatred that will not look closer at its object has already told you something about itself.
Hearsay To Every Other	History	Argument	96	95%	99	Paine says that whatever a revelation was to the first person who received it, everyone after that has only his word for it. Once a revelation is passed on, it becomes hearsay.
Heat and Light	Spirituality	Argument	90	100%	10	The test James borrows and then misreads. Edwards asks for both: a heart genuinely moved, and an understanding that has genuinely seen. Heat alone is not holiness, and light alone is a cold head full of notions.
Heresy Is No Light Word	Ecclesiology	Argument	82	100%	10	Makes the accuser carry his own charge. Heresy is not an insult and not a filing category — it is the claim that a man has walked out of salvation, and a claim that size has to be proved rather than shouted.
Hide Me	Bible	Type shift	—	—	10	Hidden from the conspiracy of the wicked, it is hard to strike. Greatly raises the user’s Defend.
His Body in One Place	Christology	Argument	86	100%	10	Vermigli answered with Augustine. Christ’s risen body is a real human body, so it is in one place, at the right hand of the Father. What reaches every table is his truth and his Spirit, not his flesh spread everywhere.
Holy Affections	Spirituality	Argument	86	100%	15	Edwards’ main claim is about where true religion lives. Not in ideas held coolly, and not in worked-up feeling, but in a heart moved because it has seen something true.
Horrors On Horrors	Experience	Argument	90	100%	99	Voltaire wrote this four weeks after the Lisbon earthquake. The quake, the fire and the wave that followed killed tens of thousands on All Saints’ Day, many of them at Mass.
Hypothesis	Exegesis	Argument	78	100%	10	Irenaeus reads Scripture by its intended structure — the gnostics scramble the mosaic of the King into a fox; hypothesis restores the true portrait.
I Am, I Exist	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	15	In the Meditations, Descartes is careful not to make this an argument with a therefore. Even if he is deceived about everything, a thing that is deceived must exist. That much survives every doubt.
I Cannot Forgive Descartes	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	5	Pascal on Descartes, and he does not soften it. The whole system was built so that God could be dispensed with — kept on only long enough to flick the world into motion, and unemployed ever after.
I Curse Him Now	Experience	Argument	78	100%	15	Perfectus was condemned for saying in private what he thought of Muhammad. Once he was betrayed, he stopped hedging. He said it again in public at his execution, knowing what it would cost.
I Must Abolish Knowledge	Presupposition	Argument	96	95%	10	Kant argued that reason cannot reach God, freedom or immortality at all, because no experience could ever confirm them. He did not call this a loss. He said it made room for faith.
I Will Not Take the Trouble	Rationality	Argument	78	100%	99	The freethinker speaking for himself, in Pascal’s mouth: he might find an answer if he looked — and he will not look, and he scorns those who do.
Immersion, or Dipping	Ecclesiology	Argument	66	100%	15	The same confession on the mode. It uses the word necessary, which the Westminster Confession, written forty years earlier, does not.
Imperative and Indicative	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	The difference located in one grammatical fact. Liberalism tells you what to do; Christianity tells you first what God has done. A religion of the imperative and a religion of the indicative are not the same religion in two moods.
Impersonal and Objective	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	99	If one intellect thinks in every man, nothing of any particular man survives him — a worry the trainer voices as his own, not a doctrine he merely reports.
Imprecatory Psalm	Bible	Argument	300	25%	5	It does not contend with the foe at all — it steps out of the debate and pleads with GOD against it. Rarely answered (25%); devastating when it is.
Imputed Righteousness	Soteriology	Argument	95	100%	10	Calvin defining the verdict in two halves, and the second half is the one Trent condemned by name. Sins forgiven, and a righteousness that is not the sinner’s own CREDITED to him. Not poured in, not grown into. Reckoned.
In No Wise Contrary	Theology Proper	Argument	76	100%	15	The Trinity is above reason and not against it, and the difference is the whole argument. He states the doctrine by ruling out the two ways of getting it wrong.
In the Manner of Bunyan	Allegory	Argument	80	100%	15	A summary, not a quotation. The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis’s first Christian book in 1933, tells his own road from atheism in the manner of John Bunyan. It is a story about a person, and it argues without ever quite saying so.
In Their Solitude	Experience	Argument	86	100%	99	James moves religion out of the church, the creed and the sacraments and into the private inner life. What happens between a person and the divine when alone is the real thing; everything else is second-hand.
In Time of Plague	Ethics	Argument	70	100%	10	Plague reached Carthage in 252 and the city threw its own dead into the streets. Cyprian put the Christians to nursing the sick and burying the dead, and did not let them sort the sick by who had been hunting them the year before. Historians still call the epidemic the Plague of Cyprian, because his is the account that survived.
Incapable of Demonstration	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	10	Demand a proof for every belief and the demand eats itself: the premises a proof starts from cannot themselves be proved, or there is nothing to start from. Clement says so in the second century, and then says which first principle he is standing on.
Incredulity Toward Metanarratives	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	99	Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern, in the phrase everyone repeats. A metanarrative is a story big enough to explain everything: progress, Marx, the church. He says we no longer believe any of them, and the century’s graves give him reason.
Insufficient Evidence	Rationality	Argument	90	95%	10	The maxim the whole essay is built to earn, and it is a MORAL claim rather than a logical one. Believing past your evidence is not called a mistake here. It is called a wrong.
Into His Mother-Tongue	Ecclesiology	Argument	74	100%	99	The Archbishop of Canterbury naming the crime, and the crime is translating the Bible into English.
Into Their Own Tongue	Exegesis	Argument	84	100%	10	Eleven weeks in a castle under a false name, turning the Greek into German a ploughman could read out loud. The scholarship is real; the audience is the argument.
Is There Still an Authority	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	15	Bavinck says the argument has moved. It is no longer about which authority is the right one; it is about whether a person is under any authority at all — which is a different question, and the one actually on the table.
It Cannot Be Forged	History	Argument	75	100%	99	Paine’s own alternative: a revelation that needs no translator, no scribe, and no council to certify it, because it was never handed to anyone at all — it simply stands there, the same for every reader in every age.
It Cannot Be Hid	Spirituality	Argument	84	100%	15	Ryle against a private, invisible holiness. A changed life shows. If nothing in a person’s conduct, temper or company has moved, the claim to have been sanctified is answering to nothing.
It Demands the Whole World	Natural Theology	Argument	86	100%	10	The complaint is not that mechanical explanation is wrong. It is that it will not accept a boundary — and Bavinck grants it everything inside its own, in the same breath.
It Denies Final Defeat	Eschatology	Argument	96	100%	10	The answer to the most confident claim of the age, that there is no story that ends well. Tolkien says a good ending, told truly, denies that the last word is defeat, and he calls it a fleeting glimpse of the gospel. The joy is real, and it looks past the world.
It Held Before You Saw It	Ethics	Argument	82	100%	15	The reply to every account that makes morality a thing people built — evolved, constructed, inherited. Sorley’s point is that the good has a claim on us that does not wait for our recognition and was not weaker before anyone acknowledged it.
It Is Not Right to Use Force	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	10	A bishop with sixty armed men outside, saying the quiet part in the middle of the sermon. He is asking for their sons to be given for the priesthood, and he stops to say he cannot make them.
It Rests on Christ	Ecclesiology	Argument	72	100%	10	If a baptism were only as good as the hands that gave it, no one could ever be sure they had been baptised at all. The minister is not the one doing the saving.
It Would Refute Itself	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10	Campbell’s point: if a miracle were a contradiction in terms, no experience would be needed to rule it out. Hume uses the word in two senses at once. Make it mean one thing at a time and his argument falls apart.
Judge and Determine	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	A stone is moved from outside it, a spider weaves because it can do nothing else, and a man does neither. Origen sets out the ladder in order and stops at the rung where reason can look at its own impulse and refuse it — which is where praise and blame become possible at all.
Judged by the Outside	Anthropology	Argument	72	100%	15	A failed missionary explaining his own failure, with a sneer. His observation was sharp, and it changed how missions were done afterwards. The contempt is his, and the people he describes had just spared his life.
"Just Your Interpretation"	Lie	Argument	50	100%	99
Kant’s Own Admission	Biblical Theology	Argument	84	100%	10	Bavinck noticed what Kant did next. Having ruled God out of speculative reason, Kant went looking for God, freedom and a moral order another way, through practical reason. The limits were real, but Kant did not stay silent about God.
Kingdom Within	Allegory	Argument	45	100%	20	Sounds deep. Means gnosis.
Know Ye, at the Last Day	Bible	Argument	90	100%	5	Turns the council’s own charge back on the men who convened it. You call this belittling the glory of the Saints — remember that the Saints will be standing there too, at the Last Day, when you are asked to answer for having said so.
Knowing How Lies Are Made	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	15	Study a text long enough and you stop asking only what it says, and start asking what it is doing — every one of these gospels eventually shows its hand.
Known by Its Fruits	Ethics	Argument	90	100%	99	Points at the wreckage and does not have to argue. Sects, risings, a burnt countryside — and all of it downstream of a sentence about how a man is justified.
Language Is Local	History	Argument	90	95%	10	Paine argues that God could never speak through words, because words change from place to place and century to century. Only creation says the same thing everywhere.
Larger Than the Creed	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	15	Every attempt to make a bigger religion that takes in all the others has to leave something out. Chesterton says the Creed already holds more of what people love than anything built to replace it.
Lashed Together Is an Island	Presupposition	Argument	96	100%	99	The last argument, and the one the others depend on. If enough views float together, the thing they float on starts to look like land. The Flotilla believes that. It is the oldest trick in the game: agreeing with each other is treated as being right.
Law and Gospel	Exegesis	Argument	82	100%	15	A way of reading, not a doctrine to recite: ask of any passage whether it is telling you what to do or telling you what has been done. Get the two the wrong way round and Scripture either crushes a reader or flatters one. Ursinus called the distinction basic to correct exegesis.
Learn From Man	Christology	Argument	94	95%	10	Clement has just quoted Philippians 2, about the one who was in the form of God and humbled himself. The Word took what is ours so that what is his could be given to us, by grace and never by nature.
Let Them Come When They Know Christ	Ethics	Argument	68	100%	15	Tertullian answers “Forbid them not to come to me.” Let the children come, he says, when they are old enough to learn where they are coming. He argues that baptism should wait for the little ones.
Liar, Lunatic or Lord	Christology	Argument	92	100%	10	The most quoted paragraph in twentieth-century apologetics. Lewis says nobody may call Jesus a great moral teacher and stop there, because a man who said what Jesus said would be either mad or worse. Kevin DeYoung adds an honest note: Lewis was writing for readers who did not doubt the Gospel accounts, and today the argument may need to start one step earlier.
Licet ab Initio	Ecclesiology	Argument	92	100%	99	The bull that created the Roman Inquisition outright — six cardinals, plenary power to arrest, imprison, and confiscate. Bernardino Ochino, the most famous preacher in Italy, was cited to Rome within weeks of it and never went.
Life Is for Action	Rationality	Argument	92	100%	10	Newman grants that certainty is rare and then asks what anybody actually does about it. Nobody waits for proof before marrying, sailing, or trusting a friend; everyone assumes far past the evidence every day, and calls it ordinary. Demand proof for everything and you do not get caution — you get paralysis.
Like Grasping Water	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	99	Nothing holds still long enough to be known — not the world, not you. Reach for your own being and it runs out of your fist the harder you close it.
Likeness Attracts	Rationality	Argument	76	100%	15	Boethius sets out nine rules before he argues, like a geometer stating axioms. The ninth says that like is drawn to like. What a creature reaches for tells you what it is made for.
Little Better Than A Changeling	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	10	Not a proof that testimony is reliable — a plain admission that nobody, Hume included, ever waited for one before trusting it. A child who withheld belief until it had a reason would never have learned enough to reason at all.
Lived Experience	Experience	Argument	50	100%	99
"Logic Rejects Most of What Thou Sayest"	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	99	The Khazar king, hearing a Christian scholastic’s creed for the first time, is not persuaded — and says why in the plainest terms the book offers.
Look at the Harvest	Experience	Argument	82	100%	99	The prosperity argument, run from the pagan end, by a woman with full barns. Every word of it is the argument Daniel of Winchester told Boniface to use — pointed the other way, and no weaker for it.
Look At Them Living	Ethics	Argument	58	100%	20	Before the argument, the evidence: what these people are actually like. Origen points at the congregation and asks where else it came from. May convict the foe.
Lord of All, Servant of All	Faith	Argument	86	100%	10	Two sentences that contradict each other and are both true, which is what the tract is for. Faith makes you free of every man; love makes you the servant of every one. Neither half survives without the other.
Loyal Ministers	Ecclesiology	Argument	84	100%	99	The opening of the Affirmation, and the reason it is the hardest opponent in the area: it denies nothing. It affirms the evangelical faith, the historic testimony of the church, and the good standing of every signer. There is no error in the sentence to point at.
Magnetic Points	Natural Theology	Argument	92	100%	10	Bavinck’s name for the questions every person in every religion runs into: they cannot be avoided, so they pull. He says every religion is answering the same pressures, and that Scripture reads those answers as substitutes for the God people push away. So each religion is a place the gospel can begin, and none of them is the gospel.
Make Me Touch Him	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	99	Saunderson, blind from birth, dying, answering a clergyman who has just cited the wonders of nature as proof of a designer. If God wanted this man’s belief, Diderot is asking, why did he withhold the one kind of evidence a blind man could actually weigh?
Make You a New Heart	Soteriology	Argument	92	100%	8	Finney heard an old Sunday-school teacher tell a little girl to pray for a new heart, and nearly rebuked him in public. God does not say pray for one, Finney answered. He says make one.
Man Is Naturally Good	Anthropology	Argument	84	100%	99	The inversion of original sin, stated flatly. Men do wickedly, Rousseau grants — and still insists the fault entered from outside, in what society made of a creature that began well.
Man of Many Ways	Allegory	Argument	50	100%	20	Cunning wins where strength failed.
Manifest from Its Fruit	Faith	Argument	82	100%	12	A claim about a man is checkable by watching him. Ignatius turns that on his own side first: whoever says he belongs to Christ has agreed to be looked at.
Many Perceptions of the Real	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	99	The picture the whole raft stands on. There is one ultimate reality, and each great religion is a different human way of seeing it. It is said calmly, and it sounds like humility.
Martyr’s Resolve	Ethics	Argument	50	100%	15	"Eighty and six years…" Strikes half again as hard when the book is nearly spent.
Martyr’s Witness	History	Argument	65	100%	10	The record of those who died rather than recant. Nobody dies for what they know they made up. No rhetorical fog can blur it.
Master of the Sacred Page	Exegesis	Argument	86	100%	10	Aquinas’ chair was a chair in Scripture, and lecturing on the Bible was the job. He worked through Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, the Psalms, Matthew, John and every letter of Paul. The Summa was written round the edges of that, by a man whose title was Master of the Sacred Page.
Men Before Adam	History	Argument	88	95%	99	La Peyrère, 1655: there were men before Adam. Genesis is the history of one people, not of the world; the Chinese kept records older than Ussher’s creation; the genealogies are a parish register mistaken for a map of the earth.
Men Die, Humanity Does Not	Rationality	Argument	62	100%	99	Siger’s own version of the doctrine, held with less doubt than his student two floors below: one soul, shared by the whole race, outliving every man who ever thought with it.
Men Without Chests	Ethics	Argument	88	100%	10	Lewis’s best-known complaint against modern schooling. It teaches people to sneer at honour and then is shocked to find traitors. It removes the very organ of virtue and then demands the function.
Merely a Breath	Theology Proper	Argument	50	100%	15	A power sent out, not a person to be worshipped alongside the Father and the Son — the Spirit is a minister, nothing more.
Millions Who Never Heard	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	99	The Vicar’s sharpest edge: a religion that claims to be necessary for anyone, and was never delivered to most of the human race, indicts the God who is supposed to have required it.
Minute Philosophers	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	12	Berkeley’s name for the freethinkers, borrowed from Cicero. They call themselves great minds, and everything they touch comes out smaller.
Mischievous Superstition	Lie	Argument	55	100%	99
More Miraculous Than the Fact	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	15	Hume’s rule: believe a report only if its being false would be a bigger miracle than the thing it reports. It sounds fair, but it decides in advance how much any testimony can ever be worth.
More Vile	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	15	Bristol, 2 April 1739. Wesley thought preaching in the open air was hardly decent. Whitefield talked him into it, and he preached outdoors for the next fifty years.
Moses or Jesus?	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
Mother and Mistress	Ecclesiology	Argument	90	100%	99	The oath every Catholic teacher swore after Trent. It claims that one visible church on earth, Rome, is the church of the creed.
Mr. Hume’s Rule	Rationality	Argument	80	95%	8	Paley tests Hume’s own theorem against a simple case, the way a mathematician tests a proof — and finds that nobody, including a sceptic, actually lives by the rule Hume says reason requires.
My Charter Is Christ	Bible	Argument	86	100%	10	Some would not accept the gospel unless the old Scriptures proved it. Ignatius said it was written; they said that was exactly the question. He did not win the argument. He said instead that his charter is Jesus Christ.
My Own Little Voice	Experience	Argument	90	100%	99	A faith made of one person’s own sense of what is right. She named it after herself, half joking. It is honest and gentle, and it has nothing outside itself that could ever tell her she was wrong.
My Own Mind Is My Own Church	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	10	Paine wrote the first part in Paris in 1793, expecting to be arrested by the Revolution. He names every church he knows and refuses all of them.
My Poor Monk	Faith	Argument	74	100%	15	An old soldier stops him on the steps and tells him the truth: this is harder than anything I have done, and I have done it in armour. Then tells him to go in anyway.
"My Power, My Power"	Lie	Argument	50	100%	20	The Psalm’s cry, swapped for a phantom’s farewell.
Myth, Not Lie	Biblical Theology	Argument	100	95%	99	The evangelists were not deceiving anybody. They were doing what every ancient community did with a figure it revered: telling its convictions about him as though they were events.
Named in the Decree	Rationality	Argument	58	100%	99	A natural philosopher, reasoning only from natural causes, cannot conclude the world began — a statement about the limits of a method, pressed by one of the two men the condemnation names outright.
Nature Cannot Explain Reason	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	10	A summary, not a quotation. Roger Nicole describes the argument at the heart of Miracles: if nature is all there is, nature cannot explain where rational thought comes from, and it does even worse with conscience. A universe that produced the thinker by accident has given us no reason to trust his thinking.
Nature Has Fixed Laws	Presupposition	Argument	80	100%	99	The premise doing the work, stated as if it were a conclusion: the laws of nature are universal and admit no exception, so a report of an exception is a report of an error somewhere in the telling.
Near the Sword	Christology	Argument	85	95%	5	If Christ only SEEMED to suffer, then Ignatius is only seeming to be eaten. Staked on his own execution — half again as hard when the book is nearly spent.
Neither Always Nor Never	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	10	Diderot treats God’s silence as evidence against him. Augustine answers: if God punished every sin now, nothing would be left for the final judgment. If he punished none, people would think there was no providence at all. So he does some of each.
Neither Angel Nor Brute	Anthropology	Argument	74	100%	15	Both halves at once, which is the whole method. Any account of us that keeps only one half has to explain away the other.
Neither God Nor Creature	Theology Proper	Argument	48	100%	15	A studied refusal to answer either way — not bold denial, careful agnosticism. Won’t call the Spirit God; won’t call him a creature either.
Neither Hellene Nor Hebrew	History	Argument	92	100%	99	Julian’s central charge, and the reason he is dangerous: the Galilaeans are deserters twice over. They left the Greeks and they left the Jews, and what they carried off was the worst half of each.
Neither More Nor Fewer	Exegesis	Argument	85	100%	10	Against groups producing new gospels, Irenaeus said there are four, no more and no fewer. He argued it from the four winds and the four corners of the earth, which convinces few readers now. His claim held all the same.
Neither Without the Other	Faith	Argument	92	100%	10	Some in Clement’s own school had split the two — faith for the simple, knowledge for the advanced. He answers that you cannot believe in the Son without knowing who he is, or know the Father except by believing the Son who teaches him.
Never Arriving at Meaning	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	99	Derrida’s word for it is différance, a made-up spelling meant to show that a meaning is always put off. He said it was neither a word nor a concept. The reader is asked to accept that nothing settles, and to accept it in a book he expects to be understood.
Never In Its Naked Deformity	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	10	Irenaeus explains why error needs refuting at all. False teaching never announces itself. It dresses in borrowed truth, so the people least able to tell the difference are the first it reaches.
Nevertheless, I Am Baptized	Faith	Argument	58	100%	25	Luther’s advice for a conscience under attack. Say it out loud: nevertheless I am baptized, and if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved.
No Assertion From Error	Biblical Theology	Argument	88	100%	99	On inerrancy specifically: the Affirmation argues the Scriptures nowhere claim their writers were kept from error, and that the 1923 General Assembly overreached in requiring the doctrine. A narrower claim than a denial, and harder to answer for that reason.
No Care for the Widow	Ethics	Argument	55	100%	15	Ignatius’ other test: a teaching that denies real flesh ends up with no care for real bodies. Frequently deflates the foe’s Contend.
No Complete Sceptic	Anthropology	Argument	84	100%	10	The skeptic cannot hold his position for one waking minute. Life keeps handing back the certainties he claims to have given up. A doubt nobody can live by is only a pose.
No Contrition Needed	Lie	Argument	70	95%	99	The part that made it a scandal rather than a doctrine. Buy the letter and you need not be sorry — sorrow was what the letter was for.
No Foundation	Bible	Argument	84	100%	15	Schaeffer’s last book was a warning to his own side. If the Bible is trusted only where it talks about salvation, then it cannot answer the questions about where the world came from or what a human being is. The foundation has to be the whole book.
No God Descends	Theology Proper	Argument	66	100%	99
No Human Trifle	Faith	Argument	66	100%	15	Luther on why baptism is not to be treated lightly. It was instituted by God, and God has commanded it. It is not like putting on a new red coat.
No Indication in Their Lives	History	Argument	90	100%	10	Celsus had the parallels first — Aesculapius healing, Aristeas vanishing, Cleomedes flying out of a sealed chest. Origen does not deny that the stories are told. He asks what came of each one, and answers his own question by pointing at the churches.
No Iron Can Hew It Down	Ethics	Argument	82	100%	10	Written by a man under sentence of death, about people he disagreed with. He did not always live up to it, but he wrote it, and it comes close to the modern idea of religious freedom three hundred years early.
No Man a Neuter	Christology	Argument	82	100%	15	When Christ is slandered and a believer could speak, staying silent is a way of denying him. The sermon says nobody may stay neutral about Christ.
No Moral Phenomena	Ethics	Argument	100	95%	99	Not that your morality is wrong — that there was never anything there to be right or wrong about. Only a reading, laid over events that did not come with one.
"No More Than We Do"	Theology Proper	Argument	62	100%	15	Call God’s essence "Unbegotten," and you have said the whole of it — plainly, and completely knowably.
No Nature At All Is Evil	Natural Theology	Argument	84	100%	10	The Manichees needed evil to be a thing: a substance, or a rival kingdom. Augustine said evil is not a thing at all. It is good missing from a nature that is still good.
No Other Root	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	10	Reid is not anti-philosophical and says so plainly. His claim is about which of the two is holding the other up, and it is not the one that thinks it is.
No Private Belief	Rationality	Argument	86	100%	15	The half of the essay people forget. Clifford is not mainly worried about the believer — he is worried about everyone downstream. A society that stops checking things loses the habit of checking anything, and then it can be told whatever anyone likes.
No Revelation But Inward	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	99	Herbert barely argues against Christianity. He builds a religion with no room for anything God might say from outside. Nothing in Christianity is refuted; it is ruled out in advance.
No Right to Think at All	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	99	The complete sceptic does not stop at doubting what he was told. He doubts the doubter as well, and ends by saying he has no right to think at all. Chesterton names him in order to answer him, and this is the sentence he puts in his mouth.
No Romanticism	Anthropology	Argument	86	100%	15	Schaeffer says the work is honest and it is hard, and there is nothing romantic about it. You press a person’s view toward its own conclusion until they can see where it runs out of world.
No Shared Scripture	Rationality	Argument	75	100%	10	Work out what the other person actually grants before arguing. Where no book is held in common, the only ground left is reason — so start there.
No Substance in Evil	Theology Proper	Argument	68	100%	10	Good is, because it has its pattern in God, who is. Evil is not — it is what men invent when they stop looking at what is. Athanasius said it decades before Augustine made it famous.
No Superior, No Equal	History	Argument	76	100%	15	Nine words that hold the whole quarrel. Schaff wrote them about the ninth century and they fit the eleventh without a syllable changed.
No Testimony Found	History	Argument	68	100%	10	Asked directly, in the Caliph’s own hall, what he made of Muhammad. He answered twice and meant both answers.
No Valentinians, No Marcionites	Christology	Argument	58	100%	15	The church’s tradition has no founder within living memory. Every heresy does — and Irenaeus can name the year.
Nobody Lies For Nothing	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	15	Asks what the liar was buying. Not honour — that was in the gift of the very people flogging them. Not comfort — the preaching itself bought hunger and thirst. A motive has to exist before it can be a motive.
Nobody Made You	Experience	Argument	14	100%	99	No one held a knife to anybody. There was a moment beforehand where it could have gone the other way, and she was the one standing in it.
None but God, None but Man	Soteriology	Argument	84	100%	5	The whole book arrives here. The debt is owed by man and payable only by God, so it is paid by the one who is both — and there was never a second way to read the arithmetic.
None But One	Rationality	Argument	88	90%	5	No one died for Socrates. They die for Christ — and not the learned only, but laborers and the unschooled. The world’s verdict, not the academy’s.
None Other Force	History	Argument	86	100%	10	A claim about method, and it is checkable. When the fathers fought heretics they did not produce a register of bishops; they opened the book. Jewel names Augustine against Petilian and invites you to go and look.
Nor Uncle, Nor Grandson	Theology Proper	Argument	66	100%	10	Epiphanius fences the Spirit by naming every family relation he is NOT — and the list is funny on purpose. Ridicule aimed at a diagram, not at a person.
Norms, or Nothing	Ethics	Argument	95	100%	10	The disjunction stated without a hedge: either the moral norms grew up in history and are therefore not binding tomorrow, or they did not grow up at all — and a standard that was never made has to be somewhere, in somebody.
Noses for Spectacles	Rationality	Argument	80	100%	12	Pangloss teaches that everything exists for the best possible purpose, and proves it with spectacles. Voltaire was mocking Leibniz, who argued that this must be the best of all possible worlds.
Not a Miracle	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10	Finney’s first lecture, and the sentence the rest of the book stands on. A revival, he says, follows from the right methods the way a crop follows the right farming.
Not a Religious Fanatic	Experience	Argument	82	100%	99	The kindest opponent in the game. She believes in God, she is not looking for a fight, and she has not been to church in a long time. The game quotes her creed exactly, and it says nothing against her.
Not a Softened Man	History	Argument	90	100%	12	The gentle teacher of the nineteenth century is the one figure the sources do not contain. They contain somebody who cursed a tree, cleared a temple with a whip, and told his closest friend to get behind him.
Not a Watch But a Vegetable	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	Hume wrote this before Paley made the watch famous. The world looks as much like an animal or a plant as a machine, he said, and animals and plants come from birth and growth, not design. Pick a different comparison and you reach a different conclusion.
Not Along One Line	Rationality	Argument	68	100%	20	Sorley is honest about his argument. The moral argument is one line of evidence among several. It shows that matter alone cannot explain the world, and leaves the rest to the other arguments.
Not an Unreasoning Faith	Rationality	Argument	80	100%	15	Eusebius states the standard the next fifteen books are to be judged by, and it is the same one Peter set: be ready to give an answer. He is writing for readers who will follow a demonstration, and he says so before he starts.
Not Being Troubled	Anthropology	Argument	68	100%	99	The man of the world does not argue and does not scoff. He is simply not troubled by the question, and considers that a mark of good sense. Pascal names him: Miton.
Not Brain, But Heart	Faith	Argument	90	100%	10	Believing a doctrine and trusting it are different acts. A mind can hold the right answer for years while the heart still will not risk resting on it.
Not by Hearsay	Rationality	Argument	94	95%	8	The difference between a thing reported and a thing watched. Eusebius had read the promises for forty years and then stood in a rebuilt church and said the reading and the seeing had finally met.
Not for Our Sake	Spirituality	Argument	90	100%	10	A religion kept for what it does for the believer is no longer about God. Bavinck grants that religion is more than doctrine and duty, but refuses to make it a mood.
Not From Myself Alone	Natural Theology	Argument	80	100%	15	The idea of an infinite, perfect being is sitting in a finite, imperfect mind, and Descartes asks where it came from. A cause must contain at least as much reality as its effect — so something that small could not have invented something that large.
Not in Persuasive Words	Faith	Argument	86	95%	10	Antony to the philosophers who had come out to the desert for a debate: you want an argument, and I will give you a demonstration instead. Then he asked them to try their own on the men who had been brought to him.
Not Into Creator and Creature	Theology Proper	Argument	88	100%	10	When the argument is about a word, ask what the church actually DOES. Nobody was ever baptised into the name of the Unoriginate and the originate; the rite settles the question the term was invented to blur.
Not Judged By His Consequences	History	Argument	86	100%	10	Kierkegaard on Jesus (“he” in this passage is Christ). He says you cannot settle who Jesus was by looking at what came of his life, as you can with a great man. A reader who waits for the results is not yet his contemporary.
Not Knowledge	Experience	Argument	86	100%	12	Schleiermacher moves religion out of reach of the Enlightenment’s attack by taking it out of the realm of knowledge. What is left cannot be refuted, and cannot tell you anything either.
Not Like Troy	History	Argument	64	100%	15	The resurrection cannot be demonstrated the way a geometer demonstrates. Neither can the Trojan War, and nobody doubts that. What it CAN have is witnesses — and witnesses who kept saying it while being killed for it.
Not Mere Confidence	Faith	Argument	88	100%	99	The canon that condemns assurance. Trent held that no one may be certain his own sins are forgiven, and said so because it judged that certainty makes people careless. A reader who has never been told this will not understand why the Reformers wrote so much about comfort.
Not of the Least Consequence	Ecclesiology	Argument	66	100%	15	Calvin on the mode, and he is candid. The word means to immerse and the early church immersed. Whether once or thrice, or by sprinkling, he says, is not of the least consequence, and churches should be free to decide according to the climate.
Not Quiet — Excitement	Anthropology	Argument	64	100%	20	People say they want rest and then arrange their lives so they never get any. Pascal takes them at their actions rather than their word.
Not Safe, But Good	Christology	Argument	92	100%	10	Lucy asks the Beavers whether Aslan is safe. Mr. Beaver is surprised she asks. Of course he is not safe. But he is good, and he is the king. A whole way of thinking about God, said by a beaver in a sentence.
Not the Author of Sin	Soteriology	Argument	84	100%	15	Accused of making God the author of sin, he answered that God governs everything, sin included, without being its cause. The sinner is the cause of the sin. God rules over it and turns it to good ends.
Not the Creed But the Sword	History	Argument	90	100%	10	The wars were fought by men breaking Christ’s commands, not keeping them. Princes raised the armies, for land. The same century sent out the first Protestant missions, and the next brought the Great Awakening.
Not the Only Theories	History	Argument	92	100%	99	The move the whole document turns on. The virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the atoning death — call them facts, keep them all, and then call the doctrine of each a "theory" that a loyal minister may or may not hold. Nothing is dropped. Everything is made optional.
Not the Origin of Personality	Anthropology	Argument	88	100%	10	One clause, and it is the whole disagreement with every account that makes a person out of their conditions: you need the society, and you did not come from it.
Not Their Design	Ethics	Argument	64	100%	99	Said in the Society’s defence, and Pascal lets it stand: the laxity is a drift of the system, not a plot. These are pastors trying to keep people coming to confession, and the method ran away from them.
Not Three Gods	Theology Proper	Argument	88	100%	10	Peter, James and John share one nature and we call them three men — so why is the Father, Son and Spirit not three Gods? Because those three never act apart. There is one work, and it starts at the Father, runs through the Son, and is finished in the Spirit.
Not Three Truths	Theology Proper	Argument	88	95%	10	A test anyone can run. Say a thing of the Father, then of the Son, then of the Spirit; if it is still ONE when you have said it three times, it belongs to the substance. God, truth, goodness, justice, power — one each, not three. Only Father, Son and Spirit come out three, and those are relations, not substances.
Not To Be Refused To Any One Born of Man	Ethics	Argument	68	100%	15	The answer of a council of sixty-six African bishops about 253 to a bishop named Fidus. Fidus had said a baby should wait until the eighth day, as circumcision did. The council said no one agreed with him.
Nothing Above Reason	Rationality	Argument	90	95%	99	Toland, 1696: there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it, and no doctrine of it can properly be called a mystery. The distinction between above reason and against reason is quietly deleted, and with it every mystery becomes nonsense.
Nothing Beyond Nature	Soteriology	Argument	86	100%	12	Finney says that becoming a Christian needs no power a person did not already have. Pelagius said the same thing to Augustine in 411.
Nothing Can Separate	Soteriology	Argument	76	100%	10	The list is long on purpose: Paul is trying to find something that could and running out. Strikes half again as hard when the book is nearly spent.
Nothing Else but What He Makes of Himself	Anthropology	Argument	86	100%	99	Sartre’s first principle, said flatly. There is no human nature because there is no God to have thought of one. A person is what he wills, and nothing else. A brave line, and the game gives it its whole weight.
Nothing Is To Be Added	Bible	Argument	78	100%	15	The rule Wyclif argued for a century and a half before anyone called it sola scriptura, and the rule this whole game is played by.
Nothing Outside the Text	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	99	The most quoted sentence of the whole movement, and the most misread. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it an enigmatic sentiment and says nobody can simply ask Derrida what he meant. It is usually taken to mean that everything we know arrives already interpreted.
Number Made Audible	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	15	A fifth is two to three, an octave one to two — the concords are whole-number ratios, and the ear knows them before the mind is told. Music is arithmetic you can hear, which is a strange thing for a random world to contain. The book’s own Defend may steady as it argues it.
Of and In Two Natures	Christology	Argument	82	100%	10	The Eutychians would say Christ was formed FROM two natures and leave it there — one nature after. The catholic keeps both prepositions: of two natures, and still in two natures, after the union as before it.
On the Resurrection	Eschatology	Argument	55	100%	15	The God who made matter from nothing can surely gather it again — dissolved bodies reunited, the dead raised, corruption clothed in incorruption. Hope, argued.
One Actor, Three Masks	Lie	Argument	45	100%	99
One Book Open To Every Eye	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	99	The Vicar closes every book of theology he owns and opens the one he says was never shut in the first place — and never needed a council, a priest, or a language a reader might not speak.
One Chair	Ecclesiology	Argument	72	100%	10	The church is one thing, and a man who walks out of it does not take it with him. Cyprian died for that in 258 — and a century and a half later both sides of a schism were quoting him at each other.
One Corner of the Earth	Rationality	Argument	58	85%	99
One for Each of Us	Experience	Argument	86	100%	99	Bellah spells out where her creed leads. If each person’s faith is only their own voice, there are as many religions as there are people. He does not say it as an insult. He says it is a natural expression of the country he was studying.
One Great Afflatus	Experience	Argument	88	100%	10	Afflatus means a breath of inspiration. Noyes lists the revivals, Perfectionism, Millerism and Spiritualism, and says they were all one wind blowing.
One Law and One Faith	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	10	A pagan lawspeaker, facing a country about to split in two, ruled that everyone would be baptised. He argued from peace, not from truth, and that is how a whole nation came into the church.
One Little Tribe	History	Argument	88	100%	99	Julian puts the scale of it on the table: the whole inhabited world, from sunrise to sunset, north to south, left in the dark — except one small people who had only been in Palestine two thousand years.
One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy	Experience	Argument	86	100%	99	Sisyphus pushes his stone up the hill for ever. Camus does not pity him. He says the struggle itself fills a heart, and that we must picture the man glad. It is the most humane thing an unbeliever ever wrote about a world without hope.
One Nature After the Union	Lie	Argument	74	100%	99
One Only Physician	Christology	Argument	90	100%	10	Seven pairs of opposites in one breath, written by a man in chains on the road to the arena. Everything the councils spent four centuries fencing is already here, uttered as praise rather than defended as doctrine.
One or Two of the Fathers	Exegesis	Argument	84	100%	15	He knew the fathers well enough to quote them against Rome, and he still would not let them be the judge. Where a father and Scripture part ways, Scripture decides.
One Ruler	Natural Theology	Argument	55	100%	20	The argument from monarchy: every ordered thing in nature answers to one head, and the world is the most ordered thing there is. Octavius reasons up from the hive to the throne of heaven.
One Serious Problem	Experience	Argument	92	100%	99	The book opens by refusing to pretend. If the universe gives no answer, is a life worth living? Camus wrote it in occupied France and gave the question his full weight.
One, Without Trinity	Theology Proper	Argument	62	100%	99	A prophecy of Zechariah's, read as fulfilled not in a council but in a plainer confession of God's oneness.
Only by Relation	Theology Proper	Argument	90	100%	10	Say “the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God” and you have said one thing three times, not counted to three. What tells the persons apart is relation — and a relation divides no substance.
Only the External Sense	Exegesis	Argument	58	100%	99	A reader who trusts a text's plain words over any tradition built on top of them — turned, here, on the Gospels.
Only the Frozen Lands	History	Argument	70	90%	10	The pagans point at the map and ask who got the wine country. That argument only works for whoever is doing well at the moment, and it will be turned against the church as soon as the church is not.
Only the Maker Remakes	Christology	Argument	78	100%	10	A creature cannot re-create a creation — it can only be part of one. So whoever remade the world was not made. Athanasius spent forty-five years and five exiles refusing to move off this.
Only Two Worldviews	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	10	Every system finally has to say which came first. Bavinck argues the middle positions are not a third option but an unfinished answer to that one question.
Opposite Errors, One Mistake	Christology	Argument	88	100%	10	Nestorius and Eutyches fell off the same road on opposite sides — one made two Persons to keep the two natures, the other collapsed the natures to keep the one Person. Both thought a nature and a person had to be counted together. Neither does.
Order in Creation	Natural Theology	Argument	58	100%	20	The world is arranged, and arrangement is the fingerprint of a mind. Basil catalogues it in front of you until the point makes itself.
Our Mutual Hostility	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Turns two thousand years of enmity into a guarantee. If Christians and Jews had ever been capable of agreeing on anything, they might have agreed on a corrupted text. They were not, and they read the same one.
Paganism, the Godless Politics	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	99	A summary, not a quotation. Lyotard suggests that “paganism” is the right response to the desire for justice, meaning politics with no master story and no one God over it. This is the argument the reader met in the first hour, coming back.
Palettes	Bible	Stat shift	—	100%	10	Two wooden ovals with thumb holes. Benjamin Franklin made them at eleven to push against the water and swim faster. In a debate they sharply raise your Popularity. Outside, they let you swim across deep water.
Passover Fulfilled	Christology	Argument	55	100%	15	Melito: the type in Egypt, the truth in Christ. The Creator’s own attributes read back as the sentence of his execution.
Philosophical Suicide	Experience	Argument	84	100%	99	Camus names his sharpest charge against believers. To leap into faith, he says, is to destroy your reason as surely as killing yourself would destroy your body. The believer, on his account, has removed the troubling world and put a nicer one in its place.
Pillar and Ground	Ecclesiology	Argument	66	100%	15	The church does not invent the truth and does not own it. It holds it up so the room can see it.
Plain and Precious	Exegesis	Argument	86	100%	12	The book says that a great and abominable church took many plain and precious things out of the Bible. That claim is why a new book was needed.
Plain Siblings	Exegesis	Argument	50	100%	15	Matthew’s "until" means what it says. Read it the plain way, and the Lord’s brothers were exactly that.
Plato’s Timaeus	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	15	Justin turns the philosophers’ own Timaeus back on them: world and soul alike live only by a life not their own. May leave the foe grasping (accuracy down).
Plunged Into a Greater Sin	Rationality	Argument	100	100%	10	Bayle’s answer to compel them to come in, aimed at Augustine’s Letter 93. A forced signature does not save anyone. It teaches a person to lie about his own heart, on top of whatever error he started with.
Possession for All Time	History	Argument	60	100%	15	Strict evidence, no romance. It holds up.
Praise Waits in Zion	Bible	Restore	—	—	10	The whole backpack turns to praise — every status effect on your team is washed away.
Preach to the Fishes	Experience	Argument	70	100%	99	They put him back on his own boat and pushed it out. Not an argument — a dismissal, delivered with a joke, which is worse.
Preached at Milan	Ecclesiology	Argument	64	100%	15	A bishop who would not be moved by an emperor is not going to be moved by you. The foe loses its footing.
Premise Locked to Premise	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	99	Al-Baqillani argued like a logician, one premise locked to the next. He worked through the Trinity and the Incarnation step by step, using the Islamic method of argument called kalam.
Presumption, Our Disease	Anthropology	Argument	72	100%	99	The proudest animal alive, and the frailest. Man sits in the mud at the bottom of the universe and sets himself above the moon — then hands the other creatures their rank.
Priests of Your Own Tongue	Ecclesiology	Argument	76	100%	15	Asks for the thing that would have made the mission survive him: Pomeranian boys taught and ordained, so the church there could speak Pomeranian. He asked once, in one sermon, and then went home and nothing was done.
Probability, The Guide of Life	Natural Theology	Argument	82	100%	15	Butler starts by admitting that only an infinite mind has certainty. A prince raised in the tropics could reason from a lifetime of evidence that ice cannot exist, and still be wrong. Finite creatures must act on the best evidence they have.
Produce the Records	Ecclesiology	Argument	70	100%	10	Name your bishops back to an apostle. Smyrna could: Polycarp was placed there by John. Rome could: Clement was ordained by Peter. A book or group that cannot has answered the question.
Prophecy Fulfilled	Biblical Theology	Argument	85	90%	15	Prophecy after prophecy set beside the gospels: the town, the mother, the years, the death, the scattering. The number of fulfilments is the argument.
Proud Or Foolish	Christology	Argument	86	100%	10	Savonarola’s version of a famous choice, four centuries early. If Christ never claimed to be God and his disciples added it later, then a faith this good grew from a lie told by its first teachers. Savonarola asks how that could happen.
Prove It Stands First	Rationality	Type shift	—	—	99	Refuses the first step rather than the last. Show the thing is there, and its greatness can be argued afterwards — not before. Lowers the foe’s Contend.
Prove That I Am A Heretic	Ecclesiology	Argument	78	100%	10	The offer nobody took him up on. He asks to be refuted rather than condemned, and promises to correct himself if he is.
Published Beforehand	History	Argument	88	100%	10	Justin’s central evidence, and he presses the part that can be checked: the books were written first, kept by the kings of the Jews, and were in hands that had no reason to help him. A story a community invents afterwards does not leave its predictions in the custody of people who dispute it.
Pure Attic Diction	Rationality	Argument	55	90%	99
Put Away Falsehood	Ethics	Argument	65	100%	15	Stop the lie first. Everything else in the argument waits on that.
Put Under Water and Covered With It	Exegesis	Argument	70	100%	15	Gill’s argument from Romans 6 and Colossians 2. Baptism is a burial, he says, and a burial is a covering. Nothing short of going under the water can stand for the burial of Christ and of those who are buried with him.
Question the Premise	Rationality	Type shift	—	—	10	Challenge the foundation of an argument before it can be pressed. Lowers the foe’s Contend.
Quietly in One Room	Anthropology	Argument	85	95%	10	Pascal traces every restlessness he can find back to a single inability, and states it as a diagnosis rather than a scolding.
Quote Him In Full	Rationality	Type shift	—	—	5	Origen answered Celsus by reproducing him — so completely that The True Word can be read today only inside the book written to refute it. An argument quoted in full has nowhere left to hide. Lowers the foe’s Defend sharply.
Rage for the Loss of Office	Anthropology	Argument	76	100%	99	The proportion the man of the world lives by: whole nights lost to a slight or a missed post, and not one uneasy hour over the death that ends all of it.
Random Verse	Bible	Argument	10	100%	30	Tier 1. The Bible falls open at random — a genealogy one turn, the gospel itself the next. Never misses; how hard it lands is pure providence. (See RANDOM_VERSES for the pool.)
Rap My Children’s Ages	Experience	Argument	90	100%	10	Hydesville, New York, March 1848. Mrs Fox tested the noises in her daughters’ bedroom by asking them things only she knew. This statement began Spiritualism.
Read It In Its Own Century	History	Argument	95	100%	5	Valla’s test, and it is a churchman’s tool. Ask whether the words could have been written when the text says they were. When the vocabulary belongs to the eighth century, so does the document — whatever it claims about the fourth.
Reason Itself Must Stoop	Presupposition	Argument	72	100%	10	Belief in a world outside one’s own mind is a first principle that Hume’s method cannot prove and cannot do without. A skeptic has to stand on that ground in order to doubt it.
Reason Knows Its Limit	Rationality	Argument	76	100%	15	Not the rejection of reason and not the worship of it. Reason’s finest act is to map its own edge — and, having found an edge in ordinary things, to expect one in the things of God.
Recapitulation	Christology	Argument	80	100%	10	Irenaeus’ great theme: Christ gathers up and restores all of humanity in himself — flesh and all. The answer every escape from the body dreads.
Red Herring	Lie	Status	—	50%	15	Change the subject entirely. Sometimes it works, and the debate wanders off for a turn.
Reduced to an Absurdity	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	The method in three sentences. Do not stand on the unbeliever’s ground and argue in his terms. Stand where he stands, and show that his own assumptions cannot hold up what he is saying. That is what Van Til means by reasoning from the impossibility of the contrary.
Religion Is Unbelief	Faith	Argument	88	100%	99	Barth’s shock. Religion is man trying to do for himself what only God can do for him. It is the opposite of faith, and the more devout it is the more it is a way of not needing grace.
Reprove the Darkness	Ethics	Argument	70	95%	10	Not shunning the dark thing and not joining it either — dragging it into the light and naming it, which is the harder of the two.
Rest	Spirituality	Rest	—	100%	5	Break off and rest. Stamina is restored in full and any trouble is slept off, but the book is then ASLEEP for a turn (two turns, one time in five) while the other side does as it likes.
Restless Heart	Experience	Argument	75	100%	10	Experience, directed toward God at last — what the Coach felt in his gut, Augustine prayed onto papyrus.
Revealed in the Flesh	Christology	Argument	78	100%	10	An early hymn, quoted by Paul because the churches already sang it — six lines, and every one of them about the same person.
Revoca	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	99	Not an argument. A cardinal holding a papal mandate, asking for a single word — REVOCO, I recant — and offering everything in exchange for it.
Rhetorical Flourish	Experience	Argument	50	100%	99
Ridicule	Rationality	Argument	50	75%	20	Hold the thing up and let the room see it. It can be devastating and it convinces nobody who was not already close — the least reliable argument in the book, and the one most worth hearing.
Right and Wrong as a Clue	Natural Theology	Argument	84	100%	15	A summary, not a quotation. The first of Lewis’s wartime broadcasts, later the opening of Mere Christianity, was titled Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe. His whole approach begins there: the sense that some things are simply wrong is evidence about what the universe is.
Rooting Out My Faults	Spirituality	Argument	85	100%	15	The test for a vision that might be delusion or deception: not how vivid it felt, but what it left behind. A false spirit does not root out a fault and plant a virtue in its place — that would work against its own purpose.
Rule of Faith	Christology	Argument	55	100%	15	One public tradition, handed down openly in all the churches.
Ruled Out in Advance	Presupposition	Argument	104	95%	8	A miracle was impossible before a single page was opened. Everything after that is not a finding about the documents; it is the consequence of a decision taken before the documents were read.
Same Rank, No Difference	Theology Proper	Argument	66	100%	10	One rank, one Godhead — nothing devotion ascribes to the Father or the Son is withheld from the Spirit.
Sapere Aude	Presupposition	Argument	80	100%	99	Kant’s motto for the age: think for yourself, instead of letting a book, a priest or a doctor do your thinking for you.
Sarcasm	Rationality	Argument	60	95%	15	Say the argument back to it, straight-faced and in full, until the shape of it does the refuting. Often finds the telling stroke — and occasionally goes too far and misses.
Scribal Craft	History	Argument	55	100%	20	Whatever else it is, it is an old text — and old texts train the reader’s eye.
Scribbling “Darkness” on the Wall	Bible	Argument	86	100%	15	A man refusing to worship God takes nothing from God, Lewis says. It is like a lunatic trying to put out the sun by writing the word darkness on the wall of his cell.
Scripture Is for Obedience	Presupposition	Argument	82	100%	99	Spinoza saves the Bible by demoting it. Scripture teaches obedience and love of neighbour, he says, and nothing about how the world works. Read it for morals, and let philosophy judge the rest.
Scripture or Plain Reason	Bible	Argument	95	100%	5	Not defiance. A rule, stated in a hostile court, about what is allowed to change a man’s mind — and it puts popes and councils on the list of things that can be wrong.
Sealed with the Spirit	Soteriology	Argument	62	100%	15	The seal is not the reader’s grip on God. It is God’s mark on the reader, and it holds — the book’s own Defend may rise.
Secret Initiation	Lie	Argument	55	100%	15	Hidden knowledge for one insider.
Secret Knowledge	Lie	Argument	55	100%	99
Seed of the Word	Rationality	Argument	50	100%	20	Justin: whatever is truly said anywhere is ours. Often finds the telling stroke.
Seek Until You Find	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	“Seek, and you shall find” was being used as a licence never to arrive. Tertullian points out that the sentence has an end in it: you sought in order to find, and found in order to believe, and you have believed.
Self-Love	Anthropology	Argument	70	100%	15	Why nobody argues about religion honestly. The self, seeing itself full of faults, does not repent — it conceives a hatred of the truth that shows the faults, and sets about hiding them from everyone, itself included.
Sense and Taste for the Infinite	Experience	Argument	84	100%	15	Schleiermacher says religion is neither knowledge nor action, but a third thing that comes before both: a feeling for the Infinite. Doctrine and behaviour flow from it and can be argued about later.
Sent in the Power of Arms	History	Argument	72	100%	10	Ask what attested the claim. Aquinas has just argued that the faith spread while promising its converts nothing but hardship, and sets the comparison against that.
Sermons Are Not Scripture	Bible	Argument	60	100%	99	The move both Meir ben Simeon and Nahmanides carry, eighteen years apart: a homiletic passage in the Talmud binds no Jew’s belief, whatever a Christian reads into it.
Serve the King	Ethics	Argument	55	100%	99
Shaken Off the Yoke	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	99	The whole creed of the strong mind, and it is a boast: no one is watching, no one to answer to, the self its own sole authority.
Shares in Royalty	Theology Proper	Argument	68	100%	10	Answers "he is not a slave, not a master, but free" directly: a creature serves like everything else does. Only what stands above creation can share its rule.
Shriekings and Tumblings	Ecclesiology	Argument	84	100%	15	Chauncy did not just read about the revival. He travelled the colonies and watched it. The disorder he describes was real, and Edwards admitted it himself.
Signs and Miracles	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	15	Ask what would confirm a claim, then ask whether it happened. Timothy applies the same test to his own book first.
Silence	Christology	Type shift	—	—	10	Say nothing. Convinces no one — but the next argument lands harder. Raises the user’s Contend, after the pattern of Christ’s silence before his accusers.
Silence or Death	Lie	Argument	84	100%	99	Not an argument. A choice with the argument already removed from it: recant in Rome, or leave everything behind and say it from somewhere the bull cannot reach.
Six Hundred Students	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	10	The Academy’s argument, and it is not an argument at all. Do not be the best debater in the room. Be the reason there are nine hundred more of you next year, in countries where saying it is fatal.
Smuggled in Bales of Cloth	History	Argument	80	100%	15	Small octavo, so it hid in a sleeve. Down the Rhine in cloth, into English ports, and out of the bales into houses — and burnt in St Paul’s churchyard by order of a bishop.
Snares of False Brethren	Ecclesiology	Argument	64	100%	15	After thirty years in the mission field, Boniface wrote to an abbess in Kent that the pagans were not his worst problem. False brothers were: clergy with a stake in the abuses he had been sent to reform.
Socratic Question	Rationality	Argument	50	100%	20	Question after question until the seams show. Often finds the telling stroke.
Sole Imputation	Soteriology	Argument	95	100%	99	Trent names the Protestant doctrine and condemns it. Righteousness is not credited to a sinner from outside, it says, but poured into him. The two sides meant different things by being declared righteous, so no middle word could settle it.
Some Sense of Deity	Natural Theology	Argument	80	100%	15	Not an argument for God’s existence — an argument about the person you are talking to. Nobody starts from zero, and the ignorance in front of you is a thing being maintained rather than a thing being suffered.
Soul of the World	Ethics	Argument	50	100%	20	"What the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world."
Sow Confusion	Lie	Status	—	90%	99
Sparks of the Light	Allegory	Argument	60	90%	99
Speak Dutch	History	Status	—	100%	5	Bavinck lectured in English when he crossed the Atlantic, but he thought and wrote in Dutch, and this book is what he wrote. It comes out in Dutch here, and it comes out fast.
Speak French	History	Status	—	100%	5	It goes over into French, the language it was first set down in, and does not slow down for anyone. The argument on the other side is still in English and stays there.
Speak German	History	Status	—	100%	5	Luther wrote for a ploughboy in Saxony, not for a faculty, and when he wants to be understood by his own people he stops writing Latin. Turned on an opponent who is not one of his own people, the effect is the reverse of clarity.
Speak Greek	History	Status	—	100%	5	The book suddenly switches into Greek, the language it was written in and the language of the New Testament. Nobody else in this debate is speaking Greek. The opposing book is confused and struggles to recover.
Speak Hebrew	History	Status	—	100%	5	The text speaks in the language it was given in. Every argument in the room has been conducted in translation without once admitting it, and for a moment that is audible.
Speak Italian	History	Status	—	100%	5	It answers in the Tuscan it was printed in — a book written to be read by people who had never read a word of Latin, and quietly passed hand to hand because of it. The opponent is not one of those people.
Speak Latin	History	Status	—	100%	5	It switches to Latin, which is what it was written in, and keeps going. The western church did its thinking in this language for a thousand years. The opponent, who has been arguing in English all afternoon, stops being able to follow.
Speak Old Norse	History	Status	—	100%	5	It tells it the way it was first told, in the language of the people it was told about — flat, dry, and entirely unbothered about whether anyone present can follow.
Speaking Truth in Love	Ecclesiology	Argument	65	100%	15	Truth said in love and love that tells the truth — Paul will not let a reader pick one. The whole body grows by it.
Splendid Replies	Exegesis	Argument	62	100%	99	Al-Qarafi wrote a point-by-point answer to a real letter from a real bishop, Paul of Antioch, who had defended the Christian faith. Ibn Taymiyya answered the same letter a generation later.
Spoken by His Son	Christology	Argument	74	100%	10	Every earlier word from God was true and partial. This one is a person.
Sprinkling Is the Mode of Dipping	Exegesis	Argument	58	100%	25	Gill’s sharpest sentence on the mode. If baptism and dipping are the same thing, he says, then calling sprinkling a mode of baptism is like calling it a mode of dipping. He means to show that the word leaves no room.
Starve the World	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	12	Finney mocks the preacher who tells farmers to wait for God to send a crop and never plough. Churches that wait for God to save people, he says, are doing the same.
Steelman	Rationality	Type shift	—	—	10	Restate the foe’s position in its strongest form — exposing its true weak point. Lowers the foe’s Defend. Always fair; never a bad move to use.
Strangely Warmed	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	Aldersgate Street, London, 24 May 1738. Somebody was reading Luther’s preface to Romans aloud, and John Wesley came to trust Christ alone.
Straw Man	Lie	Argument	40	70%	15	Answer an easier version of the argument than the one that was made. Often lands — but leaves the real position undefended.
Strike From the Diptychs	Ecclesiology	Type shift	—	—	99	The patriarch stopped reading the pope’s name in the prayers of the liturgy. It was a quiet act, and the historian Adrian Fortescue calls it open schism. Lowers the foe’s Popularity.
Stronger Than Kings	Faith	Argument	78	100%	10	Emperor Leo III was pulling down images in Constantinople. John of Damascus could answer him freely because the emperor could not reach him: John lived at Mar Saba, under a Muslim caliph.
Suicides, Not Martyrs	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	99	The charge in one sentence, from Christians who wanted no part of a movement they feared would end badly. Nobody forced these men to deny Christ. They walked in and started a fight they knew was a capital crime.
Sun, Light and Heat	Theology Proper	Argument	70	100%	15	The Caliph called it his favourite of Timothy’s illustrations. One sun, and nobody counts the light and the heat as two more suns.
Table of Chords	Rationality	Argument	50	100%	20	The first trigonometric table in history — Hipparchus’ own craft.
Take Away Assertions	Presupposition	Argument	95	100%	5	Refuses the offer of a tasteful suspension of judgement. A faith that will not assert anything is not a modest faith — it is not the thing under discussion at all.
Take Back the Island	Rationality	Argument	78	100%	10	The parody is accepted and then handed back. Find anything else the argument fits, Anselm says, and I will go and fetch your island myself — because it fits exactly one thing, and that is why the parody fails.
Take Care of Each Other	Experience	Argument	84	100%	99	The centre of her faith is not a doctrine but a kindness: love yourself, be gentle with yourself, and take care of each other. It is true as far as it goes, and it is a good deal more than many arguments in this game can say.
Take Up and Read	Bible	Argument	80	100%	5	A child’s voice over a garden wall, chanting a game: take up and read. He took up the book, read the first passage his eyes fell on, and did not need to read any further.
Taken to a Desert	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	10	A thought experiment doing real work: strip away every bishop and see what is left of ordination. What remains is a church that can still call a man to preach — which tells you what ordination was ever for.
Taken Up, Not Put to Death	History	Argument	70	100%	99	The standard Muslim reading of the Qur'an: Jesus was raised to God, and it was made only to APPEAR that he was crucified. The ascension is granted. The death is not.
Taking the Roof Off	Anthropology	Argument	92	100%	10	Schaeffer’s picture of what an honest conversation does. Show a person what their own view leads to, slowly, and without pretending it is easy. It hurts, and it is meant to, because the alternative is to leave someone comfortable in a house with no roof.
Talking Cross	Lie	Argument	60	90%	15	Its resurrection scene outgrows the witnesses.
Temples Demolished	Ecclesiology	Argument	94	100%	99	Article I, and it does not argue a single point of doctrine. It orders every Reformed church in France torn down, on a schedule, as a matter of royal housekeeping.
Test the Teacher	Ethics	Argument	60	100%	15	The manual’s practical test: does he do what he teaches? Often takes the credibility out from under the foe, lowering its Contend. Hits forged and pseudonymous books especially hard.
Tested Them and Found Them False	Ecclesiology	Argument	72	100%	10	Ephesus was commended for one habit above all others: it checked. Somebody arrived claiming to be an apostle, and the church asked, and the claim did not survive being asked. Often finds the telling stroke.
Testimony of the Soul	Presupposition	Argument	80	100%	3	Nobody coaches a man startled awake, or a woman who has just heard bad news. Tertullian listens to what people say when they are not being religious at all, and finds the same word in every mouth.
Than Which Nothing Greater	Rationality	Argument	82	90%	5	Addressed to the fool of Psalm 14, and it uses his own understanding against him: to deny the idea, he must first hold it. Expensive, and it does not always land.
That Deep-Eyed German Beast	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	99	The moment a serious scholar stops treating you as a colleague. He does not refute you; he declines to continue, and says why to somebody else.
That Inestimable Gift	Soteriology	Argument	72	100%	99	The claim underneath the sales pitch, and the serious one: that a letter bought at a stall is the means by which a man is reconciled to God.
"That’s Three Gods"	Lie	Argument	45	100%	99
The Age of Criticism	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	Kant’s footnote to the first preface. Religion and law used to claim an exemption from criticism. Kant says anything that asks for exemption deserves suspicion.
The Annual Letter	Ecclesiology	Argument	84	100%	10	Every year after Epiphany the bishop of Alexandria wrote to every church in Egypt to say when Easter fell — and, while he had their attention, what they were to believe. Athanasius sent forty-five of them, several from exile, and slipped the canon of Scripture into the thirty-ninth. It is church government by post, and it worked.
The Anxious Seat	Experience	Argument	88	100%	10	A front bench kept empty for anyone troubled about their soul, who could come forward, be prayed for and talked to in front of everyone. Finney made it famous. Its descendant is the altar call.
The Article We Both Signed	Soteriology	Argument	88	100%	99	Regensburg’s own claim, and it is not a trick: delegates from both sides did agree a statement on justification, and a cardinal carried it to Rome in good faith. The question the room asks is whether a sentence both parties can sign is the same thing as one doctrine.
The Assent of Piety	Faith	Argument	84	100%	10	The Greeks called faith futile and barbarous — credulity with a foreign accent. Clement does not deny that faith comes before proof. He says what it actually is: a choice made on purpose, and the beginning of every action a man takes.
The Benefit of Christ	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	The most-read devotional book of the whole Italian Reformation — tens of thousands of copies before the Inquisition could stop it. Its whole case for justification by faith alone is built out of Paul, laid end to end, in plain Italian a layman could follow without a confessor standing over the page.
The Blood Is Seed	Ethics	Argument	65	100%	10	Tertullian’s real sentence, not the popular misquote. It is a warning to Rome: every persecution makes the church grow. Hits harder when the book is nearly spent.
The Broken Bread	Ecclesiology	Restore	—	—	10	The oldest eucharistic prayer we have. What was scattered is gathered into one: clears every status effect from your whole team.
The Burden of Sin	Soteriology	Type shift	—	—	10	Boso says a moment’s honest regret would surely settle it. Anselm tells him he has not yet weighed the thing he is offering to settle. Greatly lowers the foe’s Defend.
The Canon List	Bible	Argument	82	100%	10	Eusebius sorted the books in circulation into three piles and wrote the piles down: acknowledged, disputed, and put forward by heretics. The Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas are in the third pile, named, in the early fourth century. It is the earliest surviving list that does the sorting out loud.
The Carpenter’s Wooden Hand	Natural Theology	Argument	90	100%	10	Cudworth’s figure for what pure mechanism leaves God holding: a hand of strings and wires worked from outside, standing where a living one was. And his charge is that the mechanists who kept the word God had handed it over.
The Charge Sheet	History	Argument	62	100%	99	Fasting on Saturday. Married priests. Shaved beards. Rings on bishops. Salt in the mouth of the baptized. Every item argued as though the faith stood on it.
The Chase, Not the Quarry	Anthropology	Argument	74	100%	99	The occupied life defended sincerely — the hunt is a fine thing. Pascal grants the sincerity and names what is really wanted: not the hare, the running after it.
The Chief Modern Rival	History	Argument	78	100%	15	Machen names it plainly, and the quotation marks are deliberate — the thing is not really liberal, and it is not really an -ism, but it is unmistakably the rival, and it is inside the building.
The Church That Suffers	Lie	Argument	70	100%	99
The Church Without Life	Ecclesiology	Argument	94	95%	99	The dilemma, and it is a real one: either you have split the church, or the church was dead for a thousand years and nobody noticed. Pick.
The Clearance-Sale	Experience	Argument	76	100%	15	The opening of Fear and Trembling. Everyone in his day was doubting everything and then going on to something further, and nobody said how the doubting was done. Kierkegaard says faith has been marked down so far that nobody is bidding.
The Cobbler and the Smith	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	15	Where the priesthood of all believers actually lands: not everyone preaching, but everyone’s work counting. The smith is consecrated at his anvil and is useful to the rest from there.
The Coin in the Chest	Lie	Argument	78	100%	99	The sales pitch, and the only sentence out of this whole city that everybody already knows. Money goes in a box and a soul comes out of purgatory, on the spot, guaranteed.
The Common Life	Spirituality	Argument	72	100%	10	Basil’s monks asked him questions and somebody wrote the answers down; the collection is called the Asketikon. He put the houses beside the towns instead of out in the desert, made the brothers work for their bread, and made them take in the sick and teach the children. Eastern monasteries still keep those rules.
The Common Tongue	Presupposition	Argument	50	100%	20	Listen to how ordinary people talk when they are frightened or grateful. They do not say “the gods.” Frequently deflates the foe’s Contend — it is hard to argue from a position your own mouth keeps leaving.
The Conscience of the Giver	Lie	Argument	68	100%	99
The Consent of the Fathers	History	Argument	90	95%	99	Fifteen centuries of Christians read this book before you did. Explain how all of them missed it.
The Correct Answer	Rationality	Argument	64	100%	99	A letter from Christians in Cyprus invited Muslims to consider Christianity. Ibn Taymiyya answered it with a long book, The Correct Answer to Those Who Changed the Religion of Christ.
The Death of a God	History	Argument	88	100%	10	The Vicar rejects revelation, and then says this about the Gospels. He thought the story was too great to have been made up. A caught Émile can say it on your side.
The Decretal Stands	Ecclesiology	Argument	82	100%	99	The strongest thing Rome said in 1518, and it is not about money. A pope has defined the treasury of merits. You are a doctor of this church. On what ground do you set a decretal aside?
The Delay of Baptism Is Preferable	Ethics	Argument	60	100%	20	Tertullian’s rule of thumb, written about 200. The delay depends on the person’s circumstances, disposition and age, and he applies it most strongly to little children. His reason is practical: the sponsors who promise for them might not live to keep it.
The Discord That Consumes the Self	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	15	The diagnosis the whole area is built on, written in 1904 by a man watching it happen: the modern self is at war with itself, and no amount of freedom from outside authority has quieted it.
The Divine Man Focusing What God Has Done	History	Argument	90	100%	10	Lewis says the miracles of Jesus are not a break in how the world works. They bring into one place, on a small scale, what the God of Nature has already been doing on a large one. Roger Nicole calls the book a technical vindication of the supernatural, and this is where it lands.
The Domesticated Jesus	History	Argument	82	100%	15	A summary, not a quotation. Newbigin spent long years as a missionary in India. One Christmas he saw people worship a host of gods and Jesus among them, and understood that this was not a step toward the gospel. It was a way of fitting Jesus into what was already there.
The Easy Yoke	Ethics	Argument	90	100%	5	Alcuin names the real reason the Saxons refused. They were taxed and prosecuted, with the preaching somewhere behind. Put the effort into teaching instead, and the answer changes.
The Elder Faith	History	Argument	60	100%	15	The charge is that the faith is new, and therefore false. Eusebius answers by going further back than his accusers can: this is the religion of the patriarchs, older than Moses, older than the law, older than the nations bringing the charge.
The Empty Tomb, and No Worldview	History	Argument	92	100%	10	The resurrection does not fit inside any picture of the world unless it is the starting point of the picture. Newbigin says so about his own age, and it is the sharpest answer to the pluralist, who has a place for every religion except one that begins with an event.
The Estimation of the Audience	History	Type shift	—	—	99	He does not answer you. He lets the hall answer you. Duke George puts both arms in his sides and says, out loud, so everyone hears it: a plague upon it. Lowers your Contend.
The Eternal Silence	Experience	Argument	66	100%	20	Pascal writes the terror down instead of answering it. The apologist most famous for a bet is also the one who admits the sky is frightening.
The Eye and the Telescope	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	15	Paley’s sharper point: a fish’s eye and a land animal’s eye are shaped differently, and each is exactly right for bending light in water or in air. An instrument-maker would have to make that calculation on purpose.
The Fashion to Be Daring	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	99	Pascal’s sharpest point about the freethinker: his daring is a fashion, heard about, admired and copied, more than a conviction.
The Fathers Said Only	History	Argument	86	100%	10	Told that faith alone was a new invention, he opened the fathers. Origen, Cyprian, Basil, Hilary, Ambrose and Chrysostom all say that faith only justifies, and he quotes each of them by name.
The Fear of Being Mistaken	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	15	Turns the risk around. The unbeliever is not the one standing on safe ground while the believer gambles — both are exposed, and only one of the two mistakes is recoverable.
The Fear of Hell	Anthropology	Argument	76	100%	99	A canon aimed at a caricature. The Reformers never said that being afraid of hell is itself a sin, yet Trent condemns anyone who says it.
The Feeling of Absolute Dependence	Experience	Argument	90	95%	10	His later, more famous formula: what makes an emotion religious is not its object but its shape — the felt sense that you are entirely dependent and have contributed nothing. On this account, a doctrine is religious language ABOUT the feeling, not the thing believed in itself.
The Fifth Way: Governance	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	10	Things with no mind of their own act for an end, and act that way nearly every time. An arrow does not aim itself.
The First Complete One	History	Argument	84	100%	10	Tyndale finished the New Testament and half the Old and was killed. Coverdale finished the job with what he had — no Hebrew, little Greek, and the Latin and the German open on the desk — and printed the first complete Bible in English, a year before Tyndale burned.
The First Way: Motion	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	10	Things move. Nothing moves itself, and the chain of movers cannot run back for ever. Aquinas takes this one from Aristotle and says so.
The Five Common Notions	Natural Theology	Argument	88	100%	99	Herbert looked at a continent that had spent thirty years killing itself over doctrine and asked what every religion already agrees on. His answer is five articles, and the honest thing to say about them is that a Christian can affirm all five. What is not in them is a gospel.
The Five Ways	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	10	Five arguments that start from things anyone can see — motion, cause, contingency — and walk to the same place. The move draws one of them.
The Fixed and Immutable Order	Presupposition	Argument	94	95%	99	Spinoza decides before any witness speaks. Nothing happens against nature’s eternal order, so any report of a miracle is a report of something that did not happen. The number of witnesses never matters.
The Fourth Way: Gradation	Natural Theology	Argument	72	100%	10	We rank things — better, truer, nobler. A comparison needs something to compare against, and the maximum in any kind is the cause of the rest.
The Furniture Nature Gave Us	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	The judgments a person cannot help making — that there is a world, that memory reports the past, that other people are people — are not conclusions anybody argued their way to. Reid says where they came from and declines to apologise for having them.
The Galilean Idyll	Experience	Argument	92	100%	99	A young man of unmatched sweetness, preaching by a lake, loved by everyone who met him. Everything above that was added later by people who could not bear to leave him human.
The Glory Of God Is A Living Man	Christology	Argument	88	100%	10	The most quoted sentence Irenaeus wrote, and it is aimed at people who thought the point of salvation was to stop being a creature. He says the opposite: God is displayed by a human being who is fully alive, and what that life consists of is seeing him.
The God of Abraham	Theology Proper	Argument	80	100%	10	Even a proof that lands hands you the wrong God. A first cause, an author of mathematical truths — the heathen had that much. The God of Abraham is known, and loves, and fills the soul that has him.
The God of Matter	Christology	Argument	74	95%	10	John of Damascus wrote this to an emperor who was destroying images. His argument is that God took a body, and a faith embarrassed by matter has not understood what happened.
The Gospel as Public Truth	Anthropology	Argument	88	100%	10	Newbigin says the church is not offering a private comfort to people who like that sort of thing. It is offering a claim about the world, and a claim about the world is owed to everyone. It is a call to wake up from a life turned in on itself.
The Government of Thought	Rationality	Argument	72	100%	15	Size is the wrong measure and Pascal refuses it. The universe swallows him without knowing it did; he comprehends the universe. May steady the reader’s own Defend.
The Grand Miracle	Christology	Argument	86	100%	15	A summary, not a quotation. Roger Nicole reports that Lewis gives a central chapter of Miracles to what he calls the Grand Miracle: the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. Every other miracle in the book is read in its light.
The Grant of Constantine	Ecclesiology	Argument	90	95%	99	The forgery speaks for itself: days after his baptism the emperor hands the pope the Lateran palace, the imperial regalia, primacy over Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Jerusalem, and dominion over Italy and the western regions. Eight hundred years of papal claims rested on it.
The Greatest Apparent Good	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Edwards argues that a person always chooses what seems best to them at that moment. So a heart that loves the wrong things will freely choose them, and needs changing itself.
The Greatness of Thought	Anthropology	Argument	60	100%	25	Six words, and they carry the positive half of the argument. Whatever else we are, we are the thing that knows it.
The Handiwork of God	Presupposition	Argument	72	100%	99	Diderot calls the sense of design a habit, not a proof. A mind calls anything beyond its understanding a miracle, and treats its own astonishment as proof of a maker. He calls that vanity.
The Heresy of Hus	History	Argument	94	95%	99	The move that won the disputation, and it is a trap made entirely of true things. Hus said what you are saying. A council burnt him for it. Say now whether the council was wrong.
The Hidden God	Faith	Argument	72	100%	15	Answers the complaint that God is not obvious. A religion that promised an open view of God would be embarrassed by the world — but this one says from the start that God has hidden himself, and calls him by that name.
The History of Class Struggles	History	Argument	92	100%	99	The Manifesto’s opening claim, and the one that does the most work: every institution, every idea, every creed is a position in an economic conflict, and reading it any other way is reading it wrong.
The Hostile Witness	History	Argument	94	95%	5	Paul was not a follower who got carried away. He was the prosecution, and he changed his testimony against his own interest. Courts have always weighed that kind of witness heaviest.
The I Want Against the You Shall	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	10	Bavinck names the modern move in its own vocabulary, four years after Nietzsche died: not an argument that the law is false, but a refusal to be under one.
The Identification Is Not Complete	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	15	A joke Chesterton tells against comparative religion. A professor shows him a carving of a local god. The best authorities say the god is Minerva. That, the professor adds, shows the identification is not complete. Chesterton says that is how most such comparisons end.
The Illative Sense	Faith	Argument	86	100%	15	Newman’s name for the judgement that weighs many small things at once and reaches a certainty no single one of them carries. It is how a doctor reads a patient and how anybody knows a friend is lying. Not a syllogism, and not a feeling either.
The Image of the Invisible	Christology	Argument	84	100%	10	John of Damascus argues from the Incarnation. He is not painting God; he is painting the flesh God took. Whether that answers the second commandment is the real question, and this is his case at its strongest.
The Infants of Believing Parents	Ecclesiology	Argument	66	100%	15	The Westminster Confession on who is to be baptised. Those who profess faith, and also the infants of one or both believing parents.
The Instrument of Moral Good	Anthropology	Argument	86	100%	99	Shelley replaces the moral law with the imagination: goodness is the capacity to feel your way into another life, and the poet, not the priest, is the one who trains it.
The Intention Was To Change Everything	Christology	Argument	94	100%	10	Kierkegaard in 1855, his last year, writing against the state church of Denmark. Christianity was meant to change everything. What came of it, he says, was the same life with a new label on it.
The Inviter Claims To Be God	Christology	Argument	90	100%	10	Kierkegaard is looking at the invitation of Matthew 11:28, to everyone who labours and is heavy laden. Set aside the offence for a moment, he says: the offence is that the one inviting claims to be God. He will not let the invitation be admired without that claim.
The Iron of My Own Will	Soteriology	Argument	78	100%	10	In Book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine describes a man who wanted to change and could not. Nobody stopped him; he could not want it with his whole heart. He called his will a chain, forged by his own choices. The quarrel with Pelagius is about what shape the will is in.
The Joyful Exchange	Faith	Argument	85	100%	10	Luther did not only argue this in a courtroom. He argued it as a marriage: what is hers becomes his, what is his becomes hers, and the debt is paid because the two are one. Melanchthon supplied the legal language later; Luther saw no quarrel between them.
The Laity Cannot Judge	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	99	The serious form of the charge, and the one worth answering: a ploughman reading Paul alone will get Paul wrong, so the reading had better be done for him.
The Lapsed	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	10	The Decian persecution of 250 ended and thousands who had sacrificed — or merely bought a certificate saying they had — wanted back in. Cyprian refused the hard men who would never readmit them and the easy men who readmitted them for nothing. On the Lapsed is the middle road: you may come back, and you will come back through penance.
The Later Hand	Biblical Theology	Argument	94	95%	99	Peter’s party against Paul’s, and the books that show no sign of the fight are the ones written after somebody had smoothed it over.
The Law’s Lesser God	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
The Letter Kills	Allegory	Argument	66	100%	15	Ambrose read the Old Testament figurally in the pulpit at Milan, and a clever young sceptic in the back row discovered the book he had dismissed was not the book he had been reading.
The Linking of Many Arguments	Rationality	Argument	62	100%	20	Not one argument but a chain of them, each leaning on the last. It never misses and it never finishes anybody.
The Living Voice	History	Argument	72	100%	15	Papias would rather ask a man who had heard the apostles than read a book about them — so he asked, and Eusebius wrote it down. Testimony taken first-hand often finds the telling detail.
The Loftier Morality	Ethics	Argument	50	100%	20	Eusebius sets Christ’s moral teaching beside every other teacher’s and lets the comparison stand. An argument that has to concede the point sometimes has nothing at all to say next — the foe may be left FROZEN.
The Logos Did the Thinking	Christology	Argument	58	100%	15	A human body, a human soul’s feelings — but the Logos itself sat where a human mind would sit. One nature, undivided.
The Lost Island	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	99	A parody, and a fair one: describe an island better than every other land, and the description will be perfectly clear. Clarity is not discovery. Often finds the telling stroke.
The Man Made of Water	Presupposition	Argument	98	100%	10	Van Til’s famous picture of what it is to argue with no ground under you. A man made of water sits in an ocean of water and builds a ladder of water to climb out. It is the whole method in a single picture.
The Marginal Note	Exegesis	Argument	86	100%	10	The first English study Bible: three hundred thousand words of notes down the sides, explaining the hard verses to people with no minister to ask. King James loathed them and ordered his own translation to carry none.
The Material Intellect	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	99	Averroes’ own Latin, on the intellect that thinks in every man and belongs to none of them — the doctrine underneath everything else this hall argues.
The Method of Doubt	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	99	Throw out everything that can be doubted even slightly, and see what is left standing. A clean method — and it begins by treating the faith you were raised in as one more opinion to be swept aside.
The Middle Element	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	15	Lewis says a person is made of a head and an appetite and something between them, the chest, which trained feeling supplies. The head alone cannot tell a person what is worth doing. That is why he says a person is a person by the middle element.
The Millennium Had Begun	Eschatology	Argument	86	100%	12	Noyes tells his own history. The revivals made people expect the Millennium any day. His Perfectionists said it had already started.
The Mind Is Lord and Master	Anthropology	Argument	82	100%	99	Wordsworth’s “spots of time”: the moments that teach you the mind rules and the senses merely serve. Authority has moved inward — what a thing means is now what it did to the one looking at it.
The Miracles of Jesus	History	Argument	65	95%	15	This is about what Christ did, not only what he taught: his works were done in public, before witnesses. Several books make this argument in their own words.
The Modern Casuists	Ethics	Argument	70	100%	99	When the old fathers are strict and the new casuists are lax, follow the new ones. The rule is stated in the open, and the whole system swings on it.
The Mover and Controller	Natural Theology	Argument	62	100%	20	The first sentence of the first complete apology, and it is an argument rather than a greeting: things move, movers are stronger than what they move, so run the chain back and see who is standing at the end of it.
The Negative Attributes Alone	Rationality	Argument	64	100%	99	Not "God is unknown" — a sharper claim: that every POSITIVE thing said of God misdescribes him, and only negation tells the truth.
The New Song	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	15	Clement opens by listing the Greek singers who moved stones and tamed beasts — Amphion, Arion, Orpheus — and then says the one song that actually did it. He is not sneering at their poetry. He is telling them what it was reaching for.
The Old Virtues Gone Mad	Anthropology	Argument	84	100%	15	Chesterton’s diagnosis of the age, in eleven words. The modern world is not short of good things. It is full of them, cut loose from what held them, and running wild.
The One Beyond Being	Natural Theology	Argument	70	95%	10	Plotinus gave Augustine a way to think about God that was not made of stuff — which is what finally let him stop imagining God as a very large luminous body.
The Only Bond Uniting Them	Experience	Argument	94	100%	99	The absurd is not in us and not in the world, Camus says. It lives in the collision between our hunger for meaning and a world that does not speak. He does not solve it. He asks us to stay in it with our eyes open.
The Only Creator	Rationality	Argument	72	100%	10	Nothing stands above him or behind him. A fullness that contains all things cannot itself be contained — so there is no room over God for another god.
The Only Proof	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	10	Van Til’s claim that Christianity is not one hypothesis among others to be tested against the facts. It is what makes any proof possible. Nothing can be proved without the world he says God made, so the proof and the thing proved stand or fall together.
The Only Proper Subjects	Ecclesiology	Argument	62	100%	20	The Baptist confession of 1689 on who is to be baptised. Those who profess repentance toward God, and faith in and obedience to Christ. It is the sentence the whole chapter turns on.
The Opium of the People	Anthropology	Argument	88	100%	99	The whole sentence, not the half that gets quoted. Marx grants that religion answers a real pain before he calls it a drug. A church that only ever tells suffering people to be patient has earned his criticism.
The Oracle of Hecate	Experience	Argument	55	100%	99
The Order Is Not a Fence	Presupposition	Argument	95	100%	5	The answer that has to come first. The fixed order of nature is a description of what God ordinarily does. Spinoza needs it to be a fence around what He may do — and no amount of watching the ordinary case builds that fence.
The Order of a Supreme Mind	Ethics	Argument	92	100%	10	Moral values are real, they bind us whether or not we obey or even notice them, and a claim that holds like that cannot be floating in the void. Sorley’s answer: the moral order is the order of a Mind, and goodness is what that Mind is.
The Overthrow of Kingdoms	Ethics	Argument	92	95%	99	The sedition charge, which is the one that actually got people killed. Doctrine is not the accusation here; public order is.
The Parent of Cruelty	Anthropology	Argument	86	100%	99	The rhetorical high point of the lecture, and its weakest link: the indignation is real and it is doing work that Russell’s own account of the world gives it no way to pay for.
The Pearl in the Dark House	Faith	Argument	80	100%	5	A pearl dropped in a dark room. Everyone is reaching, everyone is certain, and one of them has it. Said to the man holding the power in the room, on the last night of the debate.
The Pleroma	Lie	Argument	65	100%	99
The Possible and the Necessary	Rationality	Argument	58	100%	99	Not a proof aimed against God — a proof of a bare Necessary Being, offered as a question: is that proof, on its own, the whole distance to the God you actually worship?
The Psalter They Still Sing	Spirituality	Argument	88	100%	10	His Psalms went into the Book of Common Prayer and stayed there when better scholarship replaced everything around them, because they were made to be said out loud by a room full of people. Four centuries of English cathedrals have sung a translation made from a translation.
The Pulse Of Eternity	Biblical Theology	Argument	94	100%	10	The heart of Bavinck’s Stone Lectures. Revelation is not one item in the world, to be weighed against the others. The whole world stands on it, so there is no neutral ground, and the deeper any science digs, the more of God’s work it finds.
The Reasons of the Heart	Experience	Argument	84	95%	10	Not a licence for feeling over thinking. Pascal the mathematician is saying there is a second faculty that knows things, and that first principles arrive by it.
The Rebellion of the Branches	Ethics	Argument	90	100%	10	Lewis says every attack on the old first principles of right and wrong is an attack from a branch on the tree that holds it. If the branches won, they would find they had destroyed themselves.
The Religious Name for Event	Experience	Argument	90	100%	10	Schleiermacher keeps the word miracle and empties it. A miracle, he says, is any event seen religiously. His translator’s own footnote warns that this may deny miracles in practice.
The Restrainer Usurps	Anthropology	Argument	84	100%	99	Blake, writing in the Devil’s voice, says the true self is desire and energy. Reason only restrains people whose desires are weak. On his view, self-control is weakness pretending to be virtue.
The Results Were Liars	Eschatology	Argument	84	100%	12	Noyes admits that every movement he describes predicted a new age that did not come. He decides the predictions were right and the events were wrong.
The Returning Citizen	History	Argument	90	100%	5	The answer to "your religion is new," and it concedes nothing. A thing can be buried and dug up; the man who comes home after years away does not thereby become a foreigner.
The Same Objections, Answered The Same Way	Natural Theology	Argument	100	95%	10	Butler answered Tindal without making revelation look tidier than nature. The gaps, delays and roundabout ways that trouble people in revealed religion show up in nature too, and Tindal never doubted nature.
The Sceptre Ended	Exegesis	Argument	90	95%	99	Julian reads Genesis 49 against the church, and he knows the text. The sceptre belonged to David’s house, which ended with Zedekiah. This is careful exegesis, and it has to be answered with exegesis.
The Scheme, Not the Text	Presupposition	Argument	100	100%	8	The developmental ladder was not found in the Old Testament. It was carried in from comparative religion and the text was cut to fit it — and where the text will not sit on the ladder, it is the text that gets redated.
The Scope of Scripture	Exegesis	Argument	84	100%	10	A verse quoted against you is being read without the thing the whole book is doing. Ask what the passage is FOR before arguing about what it says, and half the proof-texts stop working.
The Sculptor Forgets	Rationality	Argument	58	100%	20	A little while ago it was a block he was cutting to shape. Now he kneels to it, having somehow forgotten whose hands did the shaping.
The Second Wall	Bible	Argument	88	100%	10	Answers the claim that only one office may read the book. Luther does not argue that the office reads it badly — he points out that the claim to sole authority has never been shown from anywhere.
The Second Way: Cause	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	10	Nothing causes itself, because it would have to exist before it existed. Take away the first cause and you take away everything after it.
The Secret Testimony	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	10	Grants that the evidences are good and refuses to rest on them. If your certainty that God has spoken is only as strong as your best argument, then it is exactly as unstable as your worst afternoon.
The Seven Lampstands	Eschatology	Argument	70	100%	10	Before a word of praise or blame, the letter says who is speaking and where he is standing: among them, holding them.
The Shipowner	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	15	A man sends an emigrant ship to sea believing she is sound, because he talked himself out of his own doubts. She goes down with everyone aboard. Clifford grants he was sincere and says sincerity is not the question — he had no right to the belief he comforted himself with.
The Silver Shields	Bible	Argument	92	100%	5	A pope who believed the doctrine refused to put it in the Creed, because he did not think the office reached that far. He had the older words cut in silver so nobody could argue about what they had been.
The Six Days	Exegesis	Argument	62	100%	15	Basil preached Genesis 1 to labourers, morning and evening, and kept insisting the text was about a world God actually made.
The Soul Travels Without the Body	Anthropology	Argument	54	100%	20	Asleep, the body lies still — and the mind walks other roads and meets other faces. Something in us is not the body. May steady the reader’s own Defend.
The Sound of the Wind in the Trees	Presupposition	Argument	94	100%	10	Lewis’s final test of the naturalist. If minds depend on brains and brains on chemistry and chemistry on the drift of atoms, there is no reason to think the mind’s thoughts mean any more than the wind does. And that includes the thought that they are only wind.
The Source of Life	Christology	Argument	80	100%	10	Follows the accusation to its end and asks whether anyone really means it. If our bread is not his body, the whole West has been eating nothing for a thousand years.
The Spirit Is No Sceptic	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	5	Names where the certainty comes from, which is the question Erasmus had stepped around. Not the strength of the arguer and not the weight of the evidence — what has been written on the heart, and by whom.
The Spiritual Sense	Allegory	Argument	64	100%	15	A passage has a body, a soul and a spirit, Origen says — and a reader who stops at the body has stopped early. The method that taught the church to read, and the one it later had to put a fence around.
The Stater in Its Mouth	Bible	Argument	20	100%	15	Peter found a coin, a stater, in the mouth of a fish, enough to pay the temple tax. The staters in your purse are named after it. God provided from a direction nobody was watching.
The Still Centre	Rationality	Argument	75	100%	15	Providence is the fixed centre; fate is the rim, turning. A thing is bound by fate exactly as far as it stands out from the centre — and freed as it is drawn in toward God.
The Still Recent Hands of God	Ethics	Argument	56	100%	25	Fidus said a newborn was not fit to be kissed. Cyprian’s reply is one of the most tender things in the early letters. The baby is something God has just made.
The Strongest Authority	Bible	Argument	80	100%	10	Rank the authorities you both accept. An argument from human authority is the weakest there is; an argument from what God has revealed is the strongest. And the doctors of the church, Aquinas says in the same breath, are worth citing but only ever probable.
The Swimming-Belt	Experience	Argument	84	100%	15	Kierkegaard can describe the movements of faith perfectly and says he cannot make them. A man hung in a swimming-belt goes through the strokes and still cannot swim. Knowing about faith, however well, is a different thing from believing.
The Teacher	History	Argument	72	100%	10	Basil died in 379 and Gregory went to his sister Macrina to grieve. The family called her the Teacher. She was dying herself, and she spent the day arguing him through the case that the soul outlasts the body. He went home and wrote down her side of it.
The Text Refuses	Biblical Theology	Argument	88	100%	12	Read the seams the other way. The doublets are older than the scheme that dates them, and a book edited as clumsily as this one is alleged to be would not have kept the things that embarrass it.
The Thalia	Lie	Argument	75	95%	99
The Third Way: Contingency	Natural Theology	Argument	76	100%	10	Everything around us might not have been. If everything were like that, at some point there would have been nothing — and nothing comes from nothing.
The Thought That Stops Thought	Anthropology	Argument	94	100%	10	The sceptic says he has a right to think for himself, and Chesterton agrees. Then he watches the sceptic go on to doubt his own right to think at all. There is a thought that stops thought, and it is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
The Three Orders	Spirituality	Argument	74	100%	10	Bodies, minds and charity are three different kinds of greatness, and no amount of the lower ever adds up to the higher. A king is not close to being a philosopher; a philosopher is not close to being a saint.
The Three Walls	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10	Names the shape of the defence instead of arguing with its contents. Three procedural walls, each one a refusal to be examined — and once the first two fall the third has nothing to stand on.
The Tombs of God	Presupposition	Argument	80	100%	99	The madman is led out of the churches he has walked into singing a requiem. His parting line is the sharpest thing in the passage: the buildings are still standing, and he asks what they are now.
The Tool Serves the Church	History	Argument	82	100%	15	The same critical method that exposed the Donation gave the church Erasmus’s Greek New Testament. The method is not the enemy. What matters is what it is used for.
The Traditions of the Fathers	History	Argument	84	100%	10	The emperor Valens held the Arian side, and for thirteen years he took the churches away from bishops who did not. Basil wrote to Italy and Gaul to describe it. The one offence that reliably got you punished, he says, was keeping the faith your fathers had handed you.
The Traitor’s Hands	Lie	Argument	64	100%	99
The Trophies of the Apostles	History	Argument	86	100%	10	The oldest answer of all to "you made it up": the graves are in the city, and you can walk to them this afternoon. Gaius says it to a Montanist around A.D. 200 and Eusebius copies it down because it is checkable.
The True Treasure	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	Thesis 62: the true treasure of the church is the gospel of God’s glory and grace. It cannot be sold, because it never belonged to anyone to sell.
The True Word	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	99
The Two Necessities	Rationality	Argument	90	100%	10	God’s foreknowledge no more forces an act than the reader’s watching a man walk forces his walking. “He must be walking, since I see him” binds nothing — and neither does the divine sight.
The Ugly Broad Ditch	Rationality	Argument	86	100%	99	Lessing’s picture: no report of a past event, however well supported, can prove a necessary truth. A resurrection two thousand years ago is still history, and history, he said, is the wrong kind of thing to build eternal truth on.
The United Force of the Whole	Rationality	Argument	92	100%	10	Butler names the advantage the other side has in any short exchange, and it is not an advantage in truth. An objection fits in a sentence. The thing it is an objection to does not.
The Universal Church	Ecclesiology	Type shift	—	—	10	The church is wherever Christ is — larger than the congregation currently arguing. Raises the user’s Defend. The earliest surviving use of the phrase “the catholic church.”
The Wager	Rationality	Argument	88	95%	5	The famous one, and it is not an argument that God exists. It is an argument that not choosing is already a choice, and that the stakes are not symmetrical.
The Wars Have Not Ceased	History	Argument	70	100%	99	The disputation’s first and hardest question, argued from the Prophets’ own promise of peace rather than from any Christian text.
The Watch Upon the Heath	Natural Theology	Argument	95	100%	15	Find a stone on a heath and you might say it has always been there. Find a watch and you cannot, because its parts fit together for a purpose. Paley argues that the eye is like the watch.
The Water-Spider	History	Argument	86	95%	10	His closing, and it is not really about Eck. It is about a whole method: quote the fathers on the fathers on the Scripture, and touch the Scripture itself as lightly as an insect standing on a pond.
The Weight of It	Experience	Argument	12	100%	99	Not an argument. Just everything she already knows, said out loud.
The Wheel of Fortune	Experience	Argument	60	100%	20	Fortune speaks in her own defence: the office, the money, the name — she lent them, and lending means taking back. Nothing she gave was ever the reader’s to lose.
The Whole Extent of Space	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	15	Shuts the exit before anyone reaches it. The obvious reply is that the gods lived somewhere else before the world — so Daniel defines the world as everywhere, and the somewhere else is gone.
The Whole Law	Bible	Argument	800	100%	5	Not an argument. The Shema, spoken by the book that has carried it since before there was a church to disagree about it.
The Whole Life of Believers	Soteriology	Argument	76	100%	15	Thesis 1, and it is a translation argument. The Vulgate said DO PENANCE; the Greek says REPENT. One word, and either repentance is a sacrament you complete or it is a life you live.
The Whole World Was Given Over	History	Argument	88	100%	10	This answers the charge that the faith is foreign. Every nation worshipped idols, the Saxons’ ancestors included, until it was taught otherwise. Every nation shares one condition and one remedy.
The Will of the Good	Natural Theology	Argument	82	100%	10	Why is anything good? Boethius rejects two answers: that good things are little gods, and that goodness is painted on from outside. His answer: things are good simply by existing, because the One who is Good willed them to exist.
The Wisdom of Philosophy	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	10	Reid states the conclusion the reasoning of his century had reached, in its own words, without softening it — and lets the reader notice that a proof ending here has told you more about the proof than about the world.
The Word and the Spirit	Theology Proper	Argument	66	100%	15	Your own thinking is the analogy: a mind, the word it forms, and the breath that carries it. Faint, and not nothing.
The Words of Men, the Words of God	Biblical Theology	Argument	90	100%	10	Warfield’s doctrine of Scripture. The books show the marks of the men who wrote them: their words, their circumstances, their limits. Yet the Spirit guided them, so that the same words are also God’s words.
The World Winds Itself	Natural Theology	Argument	92	95%	99	The clockmaker set the mechanism going by fixed law and stepped back. Everything since has run on its own. Particular providence, then miracle, then prayer — each quietly loses the place where it used to act.
The Wrong That Has No Words	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	99	A summary, not a quotation. Lyotard calls it the differend: a wrong so complete that the court’s own language cannot say it was a wrong. His chief example is Auschwitz, and the sorrow in it is real. The question it leaves is who then has the standing to say the wrong was wrong.
Their Form Of Beauty	Natural Theology	Argument	86	100%	10	Augustine puts the question to the earth, the sea, the air and the stars, and every one of them answers that it is not God. So he asks them for something about him instead, and they all say the same short thing. He notes how the asking was done: he looked at them, and the way they looked back was the reply.
Their High Social Rank	Ethics	Argument	55	100%	99	Not a doctrinal complaint — a civic one. The essayist counts what Christians in the city actually have: office, dress, horses, standing.
Their Own Poets	Rationality	Argument	65	100%	10	Paul on Mars Hill: quote their poets, then preach the risen Christ.
Then It Was Made Law	History	Argument	72	100%	15	What the ruling actually allowed, which nobody remembers: private sacrifice, horseflesh, and the exposure of infants, all left standing. Ari records the concessions in the same breath as the baptism. All three were withdrawn within a few winters.
Then They Had a Beginning	Natural Theology	Argument	82	100%	10	Let them keep their stories of gods being married and born. A god who was born was not there first, and whatever was not there first is not God.
Then Who Made God	Rationality	Argument	96	100%	99	Russell says his father’s question settled it for him at eighteen: if everything has a cause, what caused God? It disproves the claim that everything has a cause, which is not the claim the classic arguments make.
Theotokos	Christology	Argument	70	100%	10	Cyril’s answer to Nestorius: the two natures were united in Christ from the womb, so the title for his mother is a claim about him.
There Never Was A Roman Republic	Ethics	Argument	90	100%	10	Augustine reaches for Cicero, whom Christians and pagans both respected. Cicero defined a commonwealth as a people bound together by a shared sense of justice. Judged by Rome’s own definition, Rome never was one.
There Was My Righteousness	Spirituality	Argument	88	100%	10	Bunyan, in the field, at the end of years of trying to find a righteousness he could stand on. The relief in Grace Abounding is that it was never going to be his own — it was already finished, and elsewhere, and secure.
"There Was When He Was Not"	Lie	Argument	65	100%	99
They Are Infantile	Anthropology	Argument	90	100%	10	Asked why God did not simply make man perfect at the start, Irenaeus answers that a made thing is younger than its maker and cannot be handed the maturity it has not lived yet. Growth is not the repair of a mistake. It is what being created looks like from the inside.
They Are Our Brothers	Ecclesiology	Argument	72	100%	15	The least sentimental defence of unity ever written. He does not say they are admirable. He says they are family, which is a harder thing to get out of.
They Call It New	History	Argument	92	95%	99	The first and best charge, and it is not stupid. A religion that appeared in living memory has a question to answer, and everyone in the room can count.
They Disagree	Exegesis	Argument	86	100%	99	One sentence, and it is the argument a reader will meet again in every century after this one. Julian gets there in 362.
They Do Not Commit Sin	Spirituality	Argument	90	100%	10	Noyes read 1 John and concluded that a true believer does not sin at all. He called this salvation from sin, and his followers called themselves Perfectionists.
They Fast Two or Three Days	Ethics	Argument	86	100%	10	Rome said Christians hated mankind. Aristides answers with a household budget: when there is nothing spare, they go without meals so that somebody else can eat. He is not arguing that the charge is unfair. He is telling the emperor what to go and look at.
They Hated the Father	Anthropology	Argument	94	95%	99	The primal horde: the brothers killed the father they both hated and admired, and every altar since has been an apology. There is no evidence for the event. There does not need to be — it explains too much to give up.
They Stand To Eternity	Bible	Argument	82	100%	10	Schools change their minds every twenty years. The text does not. Whatever is settled by a fashion can be unsettled by the next one.
Things Repugnant to Reason	Rationality	Argument	76	100%	12	Having praised the Gospels, the Vicar turns straight round. He admires the story and cannot accept the miracles in it, so he says he will respect it in silence.
Thinking Lost Hold Upon Being	Rationality	Argument	88	100%	10	Idealism cut the link between the mind and the world, hoping to protect knowledge from the senses. Bavinck shows where that leads: once thinking has lost its grip on what is real, more thinking cannot get it back.
Thirty Aeons	Allegory	Argument	60	85%	99	Thirty ranked emanations, named and paired, stacked between the reader and God — the sheer detail offered as though it were itself the evidence. Irenaeus’s answer is one plain question: where did the apostles ever teach any of this?
Thirty-Seven Volumes	Rationality	Argument	50	100%	20	Everything the ancients knew — and several things they merely repeated.
This I Read Not There	Christology	Argument	84	100%	10	Augustine found the Word, and God, and the light, in the books of the Platonists. He did not find the Word made flesh. Grant a philosopher everything he has, and then name the thing he has not got.
This Is My Hand	Bible	Argument	76	100%	15	Words mean what they would mean in a mouth. Wyclif will not let a sentence do something in church that it could not do at a table.
This or Nothing	Presupposition	Argument	94	100%	10	Van Til will not say that Christianity is a little better than the alternatives. He says it is the only view that does not turn human experience into nothing. The reader is being asked to take that claim seriously, and it is the one the whole raft sea was built to deny.
Thou Wert Within	Experience	Argument	86	100%	10	Augustine turned inward centuries before the Romantic poets. Look within, he says, but God was already there before you, and the search does not end with the self.
Thoughts Without Content	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	12	Kant’s famous balance. The mind supplies the concepts and the senses supply the material, and neither knows anything alone. So God, who is not a thing the senses meet, cannot be known.
Three Classes of Books	Rationality	Argument	78	100%	15	Luther’s answer at Worms, which few remember. He sorted his books first: plain gospel that friend and foe both accept, books against abuses, and books where he had been ruder than he should have been. He could not take back even those.
Three in Degree	Theology Proper	Argument	80	100%	10	Around A.D. 213 Praxeas was teaching in Rome that the Father and the Son are one person. Tertullian answered with the terms the Latin church used from then on: one substance, three persons, set in order.
Three Kinds of Music	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	15	Boethius names three kinds of music: the music of the heavens and the seasons, the music of a well-ordered person, body and soul in tune, and the music you can hear. It is one order at three scales. A world that runs on ratios was designed by a mind.
Three Mysteries	Christology	Argument	82	100%	10	Ignatius keeps returning to silence: God does his greatest works quietly. Here he names three: Mary’s virginity, the birth of her child, and the death of the Lord, all hidden from the powers of the world.
Through the Son	Theology Proper	Argument	84	100%	10	The formula through the Son was written down before the Filioque quarrel began, and it has been offered at every attempt to end it, at Ferrara in 1439 and at Bonn in 1875. It has not healed the split, but it is still there to use.
To Do as He Pleases	Soteriology	Argument	84	100%	12	Edwards defines freedom the way ordinary speech does: being able to do what you want. The harder question, he says, is where the wanting comes from.
To Him Be the Glory	Spirituality	Type shift	—	—	10	A doxology, not an argument. The book stops defending itself and hands the glory over — and greatly raises its own Defend by doing it.
To Punish Better	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	99	The humane reforms of the eighteenth century were real, and Foucault grants it. Then he points at what came with them: watching, sorting and recording, which reach further than a whip. Enlightenment kindness, he says, was also a better way to control people.
To Serve, Not to Lord It	History	Argument	84	100%	10	The rule for reading the fathers, in one clause. They are ours and we are not theirs — which is why Calvin can quote them for four pages and still not be bound when they are wrong.
To the Pope Better Informed	Ecclesiology	Argument	78	100%	15	The most Catholic move Luther ever made, and he made it running. Appeal past the legate to the pope himself — not against the office, but from an office badly briefed to the same office briefed properly.
Tower Vision	Allegory	Argument	60	80%	20	The Shepherd’s great image — vivid when it lands, easy to talk past.
Train for Godliness	Ethics	Argument	58	100%	20	Godliness is trained for, the way a body is. Slow, unglamorous, and it holds — the book’s own Defend may rise.
Tried by the Scriptures	Bible	Argument	95	100%	5	Turns the defence into a demand. You say I am a heretic; the fathers tried heretics out of the Scriptures, so try me there. The whole force of it is that the accuser is the one avoiding the trial.
Trinitas	Theology Proper	Argument	75	100%	10	Against Praxeas, answered with grammar rather than mystery: in scene after scene of Scripture there is one who speaks, one who is spoken to, and one who is spoken about, and no amount of costume-changing makes those the same person.
Truly Born, Truly Ate	Christology	Argument	40	100%	25	Ignatius’s stubborn adverb: TRULY.
Trumpets of Jericho	Rationality	Argument	84	100%	10	The walls are procedure, and procedure is paper. Luther asks for the one instrument in Scripture that brought a wall down without a siege.
Truth Bound to Reality	Rationality	Argument	86	100%	10	The plain answer, in one sentence. A claim is true if it matches the world. It is not true because a group prefers it. Everything the Rorty raft says depends on denying this, and it says it while expecting to be believed.
Turn the Charge	Ethics	Argument	60	100%	15	Tertullian quits playing defense. The people accusing Christians of devouring infants are the people filling the arena — so he hands the charge back, addressed. Frequently drops the foe’s Contend.
Twisting Truth	Lie	Argument	65	100%	15	Real truth, bent. Strikes hard — and recoils hard on any honest reader who wields it.
Two and Three Months Old	Lie	Argument	76	100%	99
Two Cities	History	Argument	76	95%	10	Two cities, built by two loves, running through the same history and not to be confused with each other. Rome was never the city of God, so Rome’s fall was never God’s.
Two Eternal Principles	Lie	Argument	66	100%	99
Two Extremes	Rationality	Argument	58	100%	25	Six words holding the balance the whole trail is about. Shut reason out entirely, or let nothing but reason speak — both are ways of getting it wrong.
Two Gods Cancel Out	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	10	Set a good god and an evil god side by side as equals and each one’s existence defeats the other’s will. Neither ends up almighty, and the whole arrangement falls over.
Two Hundred Editions	History	Argument	88	100%	10	The Bible of the English-speaking world for seventy years — Shakespeare’s, Cromwell’s, the one that went on the Mayflower — and it was printed in a foreign city by refugees with no licence to print anything.
Two Kinds of Corruption	Exegesis	Argument	60	100%	99	Al-Tufi was more careful than most critics. He separated two charges: misreading a true text (ta’wil) and changing the text itself (tabdil). Then he went through the Gospels chapter by chapter, looking for both.
Two Perfect Natures	Christology	Argument	80	100%	10	Chalcedon, held steady against the error on either side of it — the union that blurs the two, and the union so loose it is only an agreement.
Two Persons, One Roof	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99	Nestorius’s picture of the union: the Word dwelling in the man Jesus as in a temple, not become one thing with him.
Two Questions	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	99	Twenty-five books on a bench and no discussion of any of them. Are they yours. Will you take them back. Nothing else is on the agenda and nothing else will be heard.
Two Ways	Ethics	Argument	40	100%	25	"There are two ways…" May convict the foe, lowering its Contend.
Unfettered Jurisdiction	Ecclesiology	Argument	82	100%	99	The claim underneath the quarrel: the pope has full authority over the whole church. The dispute was about that office, not about bread.
Unity Is No Mark	Ecclesiology	Argument	92	100%	5	Grants the whole of the premise and refuses the conclusion. Concord is good and it is not a test — because the people at the foot of the golden calf had it, and so did the crowd outside Pilate’s door.
Unless By The Son Revealing	Christology	Argument	92	100%	10	Every system Irenaeus answered offered a way to God that went around the Son: a secret name, a higher spirit, knowledge for a few. He shuts them all out at once. Only the Son makes the Father known.
Unmoved Mover	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	Every motion needs a mover; the chain cannot run back forever.
Until Midnight	Ecclesiology	Status	—	100%	10	Keep preaching. Then keep preaching. The opposing book stops being able to hold the thread and SLEEPS for a turn or three — it cannot answer at all while it does.
Use As Pilgrims	History	Argument	90	100%	10	Both cities want the roads mended and bread on the table. The difference is how they hold these things: one treats them as the goal, the other as supplies for a journey. Augustine will not let the reader despise the city he lives in, or settle down in it.
Vain Search in Books	Rationality	Argument	72	100%	99	The claim that he HAS examined it — a few hours with a book, a question put to a priest — and came away empty. Pascal has heard it, and does not believe it.
Videat Deus et Iudicet	Ecclesiology	Argument	88	95%	99	Saturday, 16 July 1054, the third hour. The writ goes down on the altar mid-liturgy, and the men who laid it there turn and walk out. No argument follows, because none is being offered. Let God look, and judge.
Voluntarily Undergone	History	Argument	96	95%	10	Not "his word for it" — many witnesses, hostile and friendly, choosing labour, danger, and suffering they could have walked away from at any point, for a claim Paley says none of them ever recanted.
Wait for the LORD	Bible	Type shift	—	—	10	Patience and trust in a difficult season. Greatly raises the user’s Contend.
Wasps Make Combs Too	Ecclesiology	Argument	78	100%	15	The name of a thing is not the thing. A company can have the shape of a church, the officers of a church and the word church on its door, and the question of whether it is one stays open.
Watch the Hour	Eschatology	Argument	70	95%	10	Lamps lit, belt fastened, watching. The ready argument catches an unready one off its guard — often finds the telling stroke.
Waxed Stronger By Its Conflicts	History	Argument	88	100%	10	Savonarola compares Christianity with the religions of the empire. The persecuting religions faded without being persecuted. Christianity was persecuted and grew. He asks for an explanation.
"We Are All Religious"	Experience	Argument	50	100%	99	Rome’s real complaint was never that Christians had no god. A city that already housed a hundred gods had room for one more. But the Romans did not want to hear their gods were nothing.
We Are Commanded to Preach	Ecclesiology	Argument	70	100%	15	Eulogius’s answer when a magistrate asked why he had sheltered a girl who wanted instruction in the faith. He does not deny it. He states it as a duty, and offers to do the same for the man asking.
We Are Not Our Own	Spirituality	Argument	80	100%	10	The whole ethic of the Christian life folded into one clause: the self is not the thing being served. Nothing in it is up for negotiation, which is exactly why it lands.
We Fell Into Laxity	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	10	Before describing the persecution, Eusebius says whose fault he thinks it was, and he names his own side. A record that includes your own disgrace is better evidence than one that does not.
We Never Live	Anthropology	Argument	68	100%	15	The present is the one thing nobody spends. We arrange to be happy later, permanently, and the arranging eats the life.
We Pray for Caesar	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	20	The charge was disloyalty. Christians would not burn incense to the emperor, but they prayed every day for his life, his armies, his senate and his peace, to the only God who could grant them.
We Proved It at Sea	Experience	Argument	70	100%	15	The speech that carried the vote at Birka, and it makes no claim about truth at all. Several men in this room have already called on this God in a storm and got home. That is the argument, and it worked.
We Sojourn With You	Ethics	Argument	52	100%	20	The charge is that these people are no use to a city. Tertullian answers by listing where you can find them: your forum, your baths, your workshops, your ships, your army. The argument is five words long.
We Who Hated One Another	Ethics	Argument	82	100%	10	Justin does not argue that Christians are nice. He lists what the same people used to do and what they do now, in front of an emperor who could check, and lets the change stand as the evidence. The claim is falsifiable by anyone who knows them.
We Will Make You More Gods	Spirituality	Argument	86	95%	99	The most inventive thing any pagan says in five centuries of these books. You want another god in the list? Do not import one — we will elevate your own dead king, and he was ours. They had already started building his temple.
We Would Not Live By Telling A Lie	Christology	Argument	90	100%	10	Justin’s case, and he was later executed for it. Every Christian on trial could go free by saying one word. The puzzle is not that they believed, but that they would not deny it when denying cost nothing.
Well-Turned Saying	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	20	A line polished until it glitters. Glitter still isn’t gospel.
What Applies to Circumcision Applies to Baptism	Soteriology	Argument	70	100%	15	Calvin’s argument for baptising infants. The promise is the same in both signs, and so is the thing signified. The only difference left is the outward ceremony, which he calls the least part of it.
What Do I Know?	Anthropology	Argument	74	100%	99	The motto Montaigne had struck on a medal, under a pair of scales that never tip. Whatever you assert, he weighs it against its opposite and finds them level.
What Does the Sacrifice Add?	Rationality	Argument	76	100%	15	A fork with no third way out. Either the gods need what is on the altar, and they are not gods — or they do not, and the whole altar is a misunderstanding.
What Everyone Has Always Held	History	Argument	80	100%	99	Herbert used the church’s oldest test, what has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone, but applied it to all religions. Whatever every nation agreed on was true; the rest was invented by priests.
What Is a Man in the Infinite?	Natural Theology	Argument	64	100%	20	Asked, not answered. Pascal leaves the question standing on purpose, because a reader who feels it will go looking.
What Is Not Assumed	Christology	Argument	84	95%	5	Whatever Christ did not take on, he did not heal. Leave any part of a human being out of the incarnation and you have left that part out of the rescue.
What Is Owed	Soteriology	Argument	72	100%	15	Sin defined without a word about feelings or rules: it is a debt not paid. Everything Anselm says about the cross follows from this one sentence.
What Is Truth?	Rationality	Stat shift	—	100%	15	Pilate’s question turned back on the questioner. Lowers accuracy.
What My Colleagues Let Me Get Away With	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	99	Rorty’s whole view in one line. Truth is not a thing we find. It is a word for what the people around us will let us say. Nothing stands over the room to tell it that it is wrong.
What Then Are the Others?	Experience	Argument	88	100%	10	Candide says this covered in blood. He has just been flogged at a public burning in Lisbon, and his teacher has been hanged. It is the question of the whole book.
"When I Was a Christian"	Exegesis	Argument	60	100%	99	A convert’s own story, told in his own words, not a treatise written about him.
Where Did I Get Just and Unjust?	Natural Theology	Argument	94	100%	10	Lewis was an atheist because the universe seemed cruel and unjust. Then he stopped and asked where his idea of just and unjust had come from. To call the world unfair he needed a standard outside the world, and an atheist has no such standard to offer.
Where the Join Shows	Exegesis	Argument	58	100%	99	Shem Tov ibn Shaprut copied the whole of Matthew into Hebrew, verse by verse, so that no Christian could say he was arguing against a bad translation. Then he pointed to where he thought the seams were.
Where the Word Is Preached	Ecclesiology	Argument	93	100%	5	Refuses to produce a lineage, because a lineage was never the test. Look for preaching and sacraments; where you find them you have found the church, and where you do not, a list of bishops will not supply one.
Where Was Your Church?	History	Argument	94	95%	99	The best question the other side had, and it is asked kindly, which makes it worse. Before 1517 — where was it. Name the bishops. Name the buildings. If the church is what you say it is, it did not begin ten years ago.
Whet Thy Sword	Experience	Argument	82	100%	10	Offered a beating instead of a death sentence, for the crime of teaching a girl who asked him to. He refused the lighter charge on the spot.
Which English Word?	History	Argument	60	100%	20	Booth’s challenge to anyone who says baptism means something short of immersion. Name the English word, he says, that carries the whole of the idea. He notes that they seldom settle on one.
Which of Them Has the Truth	History	Argument	58	100%	20	Aristides sorts the whole human race into groups and then does the thing nobody expects: he judges each one by what it says about itself. No group is dismissed unheard, and none is excused the comparison either.
Whispering and Winking	Presupposition	Argument	96	100%	8	The Arians agreed to every phrase, because every phrase could also be said of an ordinary man. So the council looked for a word they could not sign. The words had stopped meaning anything.
Who Is the Strongest?	Rationality	Argument	78	95%	10	Turns an endless pantheon into an endless anxiety. If the gods still beget gods there is no counting them, and no man can know whom he has already offended.
Wholly Abolished	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	10	Rome, in council, ending the trade the Ninety-Five Theses were written against — and saying out loud that heretics were blaspheming the name of indulgences because of the abuses. The doctrine hardened. The stall was shut.
Why Am I in Bonds?	History	Argument	92	100%	8	The cheapest answer to a man in chains is that he has misunderstood his own religion. Ignatius puts the cost on the table instead: if the suffering was only an appearance, then so is this, and I am about to die for nothing.
"Why Did He Hide?"	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
Why Did He Neglect Us?	History	Argument	94	100%	99	The hardest question in the book, and it is not asked in bad faith. If this God made everyone, where was he for everyone else, for all those centuries, in every country?
Why Hasten the Innocent?	Ethics	Argument	56	100%	25	A question Tertullian leaves hanging. If the young are innocent, he asks, why hurry them to the forgiveness of sins? He puts it as a plain question and moves on.
Why Not Yours	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	10	Marx, Freud and the critical scholars all make the same move. They explain away every belief by the believer’s class, wishes or party. None of them turns that suspicion on their own theory. If every idea is a weapon, so is theirs.
Why Reject What Serves?	Rationality	Argument	74	100%	15	The second half of the same speech, and the sting is in the middle of it: we cannot be sure our own gods are well disposed. A pagan at a pagan assembly saying the quiet thing about pagan religion.
"Why Seminary?"	Experience	Argument	60	100%	99
Why Spare the Christians?	History	Argument	72	100%	15	Takes the gods at their word about their own powers, then reads the news. If they punish those who despise them, the Christians pulling down their shrines across half of Europe should be the first to go.
Will They or Nill They	Natural Theology	Argument	86	100%	15	On Romans 1. The Epicureans tried to argue God out of the human mind, and the Academic sceptics said nothing can be known for certain. Vermigli says neither succeeded: the knowledge of God is planted in every person, and it stays there whether they want it or not.
Wisdom and Religion	Rationality	Argument	66	100%	15	Philosophy without worship has nothing to obey; worship without philosophy has nothing to think. Lactantius takes seven books to argue they were never two subjects.
Wishy-Washy Enough	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	99	The friendliest opponent in the game, and the most dangerous. Rorty hopes the churches that water the faith down will finish the job, and that nobody will mind. He grants that something will be lost. He thinks more will be gained.
With Most Pious and Maternal Care	Ecclesiology	Argument	64	100%	15	Augustine on the practice of baptising infants. He writes in 415 that the whole church holds it, and that it is kept up with pious and motherly care. He is arguing against Pelagius, who denied that infants carried any sin.
Withering Curse	Lie	Argument	55	100%	15	Nothing like the Gospels’ Christ.
Within a Fortnight	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	99	Article IV. Every Reformed pastor who will not convert is given two weeks to leave the kingdom for good — and forbidden, for those same two weeks, to preach even one more sermon on his way out, on pain of the galleys.
Without Beginning	Theology Proper	Argument	70	100%	10	There was never a Father who was not already Father. Unbegotten, without beginning — and therefore never without a Son.
Word Made Flesh	Christology	Argument	70	100%	6	From Athanasius: only the Creator can recreate.
Works That Remain	History	Argument	60	100%	10	Quadratus: some whom Christ healed "remained to our own day."
Wrath of Achilles	Allegory	Argument	55	100%	20	The oldest opening line in Greek literature, still swinging.
You Are All Heretics	Lie	Argument	88	100%	99	Not one charge but a heap of them delivered at once, which is how it was actually done — heresy, novelty, sects, and the overthrow of every kingdom in Europe, in a single breath.
You Are Still a Manichee	Lie	Argument	76	100%	99
You Have No Shoes	Natural Theology	Argument	84	95%	99	Two charges in one breath, and the second is the harder. A God of glory would send a fit ambassador — and you, specifically, are here because you are poor.
You Have Not Met a Bishop	History	Argument	82	100%	10	The prefect Modestus told Basil what the empire could do to him: confiscation, banishment, torture, death. Basil answered that a man who owns a few books cannot be robbed, that he counts no country his own, and that his body had stopped being reachable some time ago. Gregory preached the whole exchange at his funeral.
You Knew Better	Experience	Argument	10	100%	99	Ignorance would at least be a defence. She had been taught, she could have said the right answer out loud if anyone had asked her, and she did it anyway. That is the part that does not wear off.
You Need Only Will It	Lie	Argument	70	100%	99
You Never Thoroughly Intended It	Spirituality	Argument	86	100%	10	William Law asks why his readers are not as devoted as the first Christians. His answer is blunt: they know how, and they could. They never meant to.
"You Skip Our Festivals"	Ethics	Argument	55	100%	99
You Spoke Against Our Gods	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	99	The charge that killed more evangelists than any doctrine ever did, and it is a public-order charge rather than a religious one. Believe what you like; do not say it in our market.
You Were There	Experience	Argument	11	100%	99	It does not raise its voice and it does not accuse. It gives the date, and the room, and what happened in it, and waits to see whether any of that is wrong.
"Your God Let Rome Fall"	Lie	Argument	72	100%	99
Your Injustice, Our Proof	Rationality	Argument	70	95%	10	Kill us, torture us, grind us to dust — go on. Tertullian invites the whole sentence, because the size of it is the case for the defence. Nobody needs that much force to punish a real crime.