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.

428 of 428

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 Boy That Driveth the Plough	Bible	Argument	88	95%	10	Said to a learned man who had told him the church’s law mattered more than God’s. It is the whole translation argument in one sentence, and the man who said it was strangled and burned for acting on 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 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 Different God"	Lie	Argument	55	100%	99
A Disputed Name	Christology	Argument	60	100%	99	No quotation survives — the leading modern theory holds the traditional attribution to al-Ghazali is mistaken, and points instead to an Egyptian Coptic Christian convert to Islam. Whoever wrote it, the argument answers Christ's divinity claim by claim from within the Gospels themselves.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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	Says the quiet thing before the argument starts. Being hated is not evidence, and the loudness of a charge is not a measure of its truth — this has happened to the truth in every century, and the reader should stop flinching at the volume.
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.
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
Aeons of Barbelo	Allegory	Argument	60	85%	15	Esoterica no fisherman preached.
Against the Whole World	History	Argument	74	95%	15	The argument from everybody else, put by envoys who were not offering a debate. Powerful, honest about the arithmetic, and it proves nothing about whether the thing is true — which is why the reader should notice how often it appears in these books.
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.
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.
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.
Anachronism	History	Argument	45	100%	20	The forger’s fingerprints.
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	Years among strange manuscripts. Expertise is not endorsement.
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.
Appeal for Concord	Ecclesiology	Argument	45	100%	20	Clement to Corinth: order and humility. May steady the reader’s own Defend.
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 takes 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 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 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.
Assertions Contemned	Presupposition	Argument	86	100%	10	Follows the other man’s position to where it goes. If holding anything firmly is bad taste, then there is nothing to hold, and the argument you were having was about nothing.
Athens and Jerusalem	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	The most misread sentence Tertullian ever wrote. It is not a refusal of reason — he used philosophy constantly — but a refusal to let people who have abandoned the apostles’ teaching call their speculations Christian.
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.
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.
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.
Behind the Father’s Back	Lie	Argument	56	100%	99
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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	Reach past your own authorities for one the room already respects — even one who is no friend of yours — and put him on the stand. Testimony the accuser chose himself cannot be waved away as special pleading, and no rhetorical fog will blur it. Frequently costs the foe its standing to accuse.
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	The instruction a bishop sent a missionary about his tone, and it is a weapon. Ask the questions without heat and the other man goes quiet from confusion rather than digging in from anger — which is the difference between a conversation and a martyrdom.
Canon IX	Anthropology	Argument	92	100%	99	The anathema on faith alone, and read it carefully: it condemns a faith that requires NOTHING ELSE and no movement of the will. What it defines is a doctrine of preparation. The Reformers still answered it, and so does this game.
Case Dismissed	Rationality	Argument	65	100%	10	A property-law manoeuvre, borrowed whole: the church has held these Scriptures since the apostles, so a newcomer with a fresh reading is barred from disputing them at all. Very often strips the foe’s Contend — it is not answering the argument, it is removing its standing.
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.
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).
Clay Sparrows	Allegory	Argument	45	100%	20	A child’s wonder-tale told as history.
Come, You Who Are Foolish	Presupposition	Argument	52	100%	99
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.
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.
Contradiction	Lie	Argument	50	100%	20	The text undercuts itself. A wild book shrugs this off — in YOUR hands, the wound is yours.
Copied Out in Gold	Bible	Argument	68	100%	15	A request for a specific object, for a specific reason. He wanted Peter’s letters written in gold so that when he held the book up in front of people who could not read, the book itself would argue. Part of the case is what the case looks like.
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	rally	—	—	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.
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.
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?
Distortion	Lie	Argument	45	100%	99
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 his baptism comes first and the province follows. He knows the early church went the other way — he says so — and proposes to run it backwards anyway. It is how most of northern Europe was converted, and it is why so much of it 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	No quotation of Abd al-Jabbar's Tathbit Dala’il al-Nubuwwa survives in English translation, but its distinguishing method is documented: he argued from the actual text of the Gospels rather than from rumor about their contents — a real courtesy, and a real threat, from an opponent who had read the book.
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.
Give Back More Than You Take	Ethics	Argument	82	100%	10	The answer to “you are only here for the money,” and it is not a sentence, it is an accounting. Want nothing they have; return more than they give; let the ledger say what the sermon cannot.
Give What You Command	Soteriology	Argument	75	100%	10	Augustine’s prayer that scandalized Pelagius.
God by Grace	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
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 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.
Golden Mean	Ethics	Argument	50	100%	20	Virtue as the middle path between excess and defect.
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 Could Have Fallen"	Lie	Argument	70	100%	99
"He Only Seemed"	Lie	Argument	50	100%	99
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.
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.
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 Curse Him Now	Experience	Argument	78	100%	15	A priest condemned for saying, in confidence, what he actually thought — and once the confidence was broken, he stopped hedging. On the scaffold he said the whole of it again, in public, knowing exactly what it would cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Judged by the Outside	Anthropology	Argument	72	100%	15	A failed missionary diagnosing his own failure — and sneering while he does it. The observation is sharp and it changed the method that followed. The first six words are his contempt, not the game’s, and the men he is describing had just spared his life on a considered argument.
"Just Your Interpretation"	Lie	Argument	50	100%	99
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 the forgery long enough and every forgery shows its seams.
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.
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.
Man of Many Ways	Allegory	Argument	50	100%	20	Cunning wins where strength failed.
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 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.
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.
Mischievous Superstition	Lie	Argument	55	100%	99
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 is not a slur and it is not an argument about merit — it is a claim about which visible body on earth the church of the creed actually is.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 God Descends	Theology Proper	Argument	66	100%	99
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 keep to it, and the game says so — but he wrote it, and it is nearly the modern doctrine, three hundred years early.
"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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 Law and One Faith	Ecclesiology	Argument	80	100%	10	A heathen judge, handed a country about to split in two, ruling that everyone would be baptised. His ground is the peace and not the truth — and a reader should sit with the fact that this is how one whole nation came in.
One Nature After the Union	Lie	Argument	74	100%	99
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, 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 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	Points at the map and asks who got the wine country. It is a real argument and it has an expiry date: it belongs to whoever is currently doing well, and it will be used against the church the moment 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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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	No quotation of al-Baqillani's Kitab al-Tamhid survives in English — McCarthy's 1957 edition is the only translation and is in copyright — but the method is well documented: kalam, built the way a logician builds a case, premise locked to premise, working through Trinity and Incarnation in turn. Even his own tradition suspected the toolkit was borrowed:
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.
Produce the Records	Ecclesiology	Argument	70	100%	10	A demand, not an argument: name your bishops back to an apostle. Smyrna can — Polycarp, placed there by John. Rome can — Clement, ordained by Peter. Any book or sect that cannot has just answered the question it was asked.
Prophecy Fulfilled	Biblical Theology	Argument	85	90%	15	Prophecy after prophecy laid alongside the gospels until the pile is the argument — the town, the mother, the years, the death, the scattering. A shared move: several books make this case in their own words.
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.
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.
Question the Premise	Rationality	Type shift	—	—	10	Challenge the foundation of an argument before it can be pressed. Lowers the foe’s Contend.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Rule of Faith	Christology	Argument	55	100%	15	One public tradition, handed down openly in all the churches.
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.
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.
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 the whole of it is that popes and councils are 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.
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
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.
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.
Six Hundred Students	Ethics	Argument	84	100%	10	The whole of 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	Thirty years in the field, and the sentence he writes to an abbess in Kent is that the pagans are not the problem. Not a complaint about clergy in general — about the ones with an interest in the abuses he was sent to reform.
Socratic Question	Rationality	Argument	50	100%	20	Question after question until the seams show. Often finds the telling stroke.
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
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	No quotation of al-Qarafi's al-Ajwiba al-Fakhira survives in English translation, but its occasion is documented and real: a point-by-point answer to an actual letter from a real bishop, Paul of Antioch, defending the faith — the same letter tradition Ibn Taymiyya would answer again 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.
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.
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 quietest act in the whole affair and the most final — Fortescue calls it open schism: stop reading the other man’s name in the prayers. Lowers the foe’s Popularity.
Suicides, Not Martyrs	Ecclesiology	Argument	86	100%	99	The charge in one sentence, from Christians who wanted no part of a movement they thought would end badly for everyone. Nobody is forcing a denial of Christ here — a man walked in and picked a fight he knew was capital.
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 the whole point.
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.
Talking Cross	Lie	Argument	60	90%	15	Its resurrection scene outgrows the witnesses.
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	Experience	Argument	65	100%	10	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 Blood Is Seed	Ethics	Argument	65	100%	10	Not the bumper-sticker version — the sentence Tertullian actually wrote, and it is a threat dressed as a concession. Half again as hard 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 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 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 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	No quotation of Ibn Taymiyya's al-Jawab al-Sahih survives in English translation — Michel's 1984 edition is the only one, and is in copyright — but its occasion is documented: a letter from Cyprus, in the same tradition Paul of Antioch's letter began, answered here at greater length than anywhere else in this room.
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 Easy Yoke	Ethics	Argument	90	100%	5	Names the actual reason the Saxons would not have it. They were not preached to and taxed; they were taxed and prosecuted, with the preaching somewhere behind. Change which one the effort goes into and the refusal changes with it.
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 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 Fear of Hell	Anthropology	Argument	76	100%	99	A canon aimed at a real caricature. Whatever the Reformers meant, they did not mean that being afraid of hell is itself a sin — and Trent condemns somebody for saying it.
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 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 God of Matter	Christology	Argument	74	95%	10	Written to an emperor who was burning pictures. The argument is not about art — it is that God took a body, and a faith embarrassed by matter has not understood what happened.
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 Iron of My Own Will	Soteriology	Argument	78	100%	10	Augustine spent Book 8 of the Confessions describing a man who wanted to change and could not — not stopped by anyone, not forbidden anything, just unable to want it all the way through. He called the thing holding him a chain, and said he had forged it himself out of his own choices. That is the whole quarrel with Pelagius in one image: nobody is arguing about whether you have a will. They are arguing about what shape it is in.
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 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 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 Miracles of Jesus	History	Argument	65	95%	15	Not a claim about what Christ taught but about what he DID — done in public, before witnesses, and never quietly. A shared move: several books make this argument in their own words.
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 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 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 Oracle of Hecate	Experience	Argument	55	100%	99
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Thalia	Lie	Argument	75	95%	99
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 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 True Treasure	Soteriology	Argument	90	100%	10	Thesis 62, and the whole Reformation is already inside it. Not a better account of the treasury — a different treasury, which cannot be sold because it was never anybody’s to sell.
The True Word	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	99
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 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 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 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	Answers “this is not our tradition” without a word about Rome or the Franks. Every nation on earth worshipped idols, ours included, until it was taught otherwise. There is no native religion being displaced here — there is one condition, and one remedy, and neither of them is German.
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.
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	Concedes the whole mythology and wins anyway. Let them keep the marriages and the births — a god who was born was not there first, and a thing that was not there first is not God. Keyed on the Swedes who offered to promote a dead king.
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 Was When He Was Not"	Lie	Argument	65	100%	99
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.
Thirty Aeons	Allegory	Argument	60	85%	99
Thirty-Seven Volumes	Rationality	Argument	50	100%	20	Everything the ancients knew — and several things they merely repeated.
Three Classes of Books	Rationality	Argument	78	100%	15	The answer nobody remembers, and it is a model. Sort the charge before you answer it: plain gospel that friend and foe both profess; books against abuses; and books where I was ruder than I should have been — and I cannot take back even those.
Through the Son	Theology Proper	Argument	84	100%	10	The formula that was written down before the argument started and reached for every time anyone tried to end it — at Ferrara in 1439, and again at Bonn in 1875. It did not save them. It was still right there.
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 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.
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 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	No quotation of al-Tufi's commentary on the four Gospels survives in English translation, but its method is more careful than a blanket charge: it distinguishes misreading a true text (ta’wil) from an actually altered one (tabdil), and presses the Gospels chapter by chapter, in order, 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, stated plainly by the men who carried it. Not a squabble about bread — an office nobody holds.
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.
Unmoved Mover	Rationality	Argument	60	100%	15	Every motion needs a mover; the chain cannot run back forever.
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.
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.
"We Are All Religious"	Experience	Argument	50	100%	99
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 Pray for Caesar	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	20	The charge is disloyalty. The answer is that Christians will not burn the pinch of incense — and pray daily for the emperor’s life, his armies, his senate and his peace, to the only God who could actually grant any of it. A shared move: many apologists have made it.
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 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.
Well-Turned Saying	Rationality	Argument	55	100%	20	A line polished until it glitters. Glitter still isn’t gospel.
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 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.
"When I Was a Christian"	Exegesis	Argument	60	100%	99	A convert's own testimony, not a treatise about him — the rarest kind of witness in this whole building.
Where the Join Shows	Exegesis	Argument	58	100%	99	No quotation of this survives in English — Shem Tov ibn Shaprut’s Even Boḥan has never been translated — but the method is documented and distinctive: he copied Matthew whole into Hebrew, verse by verse, specifically so no Christian could say he was arguing against a mistranslation, then pointed at the seams.
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.
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 Did He Hide?"	Lie	Argument	60	100%	99
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.
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.
Withering Curse	Lie	Argument	55	100%	15	Nothing like the Gospels’ Christ.
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 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.