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.

603 of 603

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 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	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 Deposed King	Anthropology	Argument	78	100%	10	The whole anthropological argument in two sentences. To know you are wretched is itself a kind of greatness — a tree does not mourn. The misery is real, and it is the misery of someone who was once a king.
"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 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 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 names the move by name and says plainly it does not work: religion cut loose from all knowledge and assent, reduced to trust alone, is not a purer faith — it is one that has quietly stopped being able to 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Uniform Experience Against It	Presupposition	Argument	96	95%	99	Hume’s definition does the work before the argument starts: call nothing a miracle unless experience is uniformly against it, note that uniform experience amounts to proof, and the case is closed — by the definition, not by looking at any particular report.
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.
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.
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.
Always The Same	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	99	An unchangeable God and an unchanging human nature, Tindal argues, can only ever owe each other one unchanging duty — which is a real argument, and it is also a premise doing the work of a conclusion: it assumes in advance that nothing God might say could ever be new.
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 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 — and that is the whole meaning of the word “eternal.”
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.
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	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.
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 you bring one of your own. It is a fair demand and a cage at the same time — the reader who accepts it can only ever be on the back foot.
As Old As Creation	Natural Theology	Argument	92	100%	99	Tindal’s whole book in one line: whatever God ever meant to require of anyone, He must have made knowable to everyone, from the very first man. Christianity, if it is anything, can only be that same original religion — never a later addition 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 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.
Avoid Custom	Anthropology	Argument	72	100%	10	The strongest argument for the old gods was never an argument: it was that everyone had always done it. Clement answers the habit rather than the case, because the habit is what is actually holding the room.
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.
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
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).
Born Bound, Not Born Free	Presupposition	Argument	92	100%	5	The chains Rousseau blames on society came inside with the man. Remake every structure around him and the fault is still there, because it was never in the structures. The deeper move is quieter: the self has stopped conforming to a given order and started inventing itself.
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.
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	And then it collapsed. Rome would not have it, Wittenberg was cool about it, and the men who had actually shaken hands in the room were left holding a paper nobody wanted. The lesson the room presses is that YOUR side broke it too.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
Each Party’s Own Religion	Rationality	Argument	82	100%	15	The reductio underneath the whole book. If "compel them" licenses force for the sake of truth, it licenses force for whoever sincerely believes he holds the truth — which is every persecutor who ever lived, on every side. The verse cannot mean that, on pain of meaning it for everyone at once.
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 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 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 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 Kept in Reserve	Natural Theology	Argument	76	100%	99	The revealed truths are set carefully to one side — too high for reason to examine — while reason goes to work on everything else and arrives at a God of its own making. The living God is filed, not consulted.
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.
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.
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.
Free Men From That Load	Natural Theology	Argument	84	100%	99	Not an attack on the gospel — a demotion of it. Revelation is, at most, a cleanup crew: it adds nothing God had not already given every mind by reason, and its whole job is scraping off what priests piled on top.
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 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.
General and Special Revelation	Biblical Theology	Argument	88	100%	15	Bavinck’s own answer to where religion actually starts: not a faculty every mind already carries, discovered by looking inward, but God disclosing Himself — first through creation and conscience, everywhere, and then, from one particular call onward, through a word.
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 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 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, 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.
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 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 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 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	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.
I Must Abolish Knowledge	Presupposition	Argument	96	95%	10	The harder move, and the honest one: reason, on Kant’s own account, cannot reach God, freedom or immortality at all — not badly, not with more work, but in principle, because those questions lie past what any possible experience could ever confirm. He does not call this a loss. He calls it room.
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.
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 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 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.
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
Kant’s Own Admission	Biblical Theology	Argument	84	100%	10	Bavinck reads Kant carefully enough to notice what Kant himself does next: having ruled speculative reason out of the question, he does not simply stop — he goes looking for God, freedom and a moral government of the world by another route entirely, built out of practical reason instead. The limits were real. The silence never was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
More Miraculous Than the Fact	Presupposition	Argument	88	100%	15	Hume’s practical rule for weighing any report: believe it only if its being false would be a bigger miracle than the thing it reports. A clean-sounding standard, and one that quietly assumes in advance how much weight any testimony could ever possibly carry.
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 Charter Is Christ	Bible	Argument	86	100%	10	The oldest recorded argument about how Scripture and the gospel stand to each other, and it is a deadlock: they will not take the gospel unless the old writings prove it, he says it is written, they say that is exactly what is in question. He does not win the exchange. He names what he is standing on instead.
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.
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 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.
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. Nature keeps handing back the certainties he says he has abolished — and a doubt nobody can live inside is not a doubt, it is 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 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 Revelation But Inward	Presupposition	Argument	84	100%	99	The quiet half, and the one that does the work. Herbert barely argues against Christianity — he simply builds a religion that has no room for anything God might say from outside, and leaves the reader to notice that nothing was refuted, only ruled out in advance.
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 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.
Not a Watch But a Vegetable	Presupposition	Argument	90	100%	10	Written thirty years before Paley made the watch famous, and aimed straight at it: a world resembles an animal or a plant at least as much as it resembles a machine, and animals and plants come from generation, not design. Pick a different analogy and the whole argument concludes something else.
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 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 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 the Creed But the Sword	History	Argument	90	100%	10	The wars were fought by men breaking the commands of the Christ they confessed, not by men keeping them. Princes raised the armies, for land. And the century’s real answer to the killing was not the shrug — it was the missions, and within a generation the Awakening.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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	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.
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.
Palettes	Bible	Stat shift	—	100%	10	Two thumb-holed ovals of pine, ten inches by six, one in each hand — Franklin made them at eleven to push against the water and swim faster. In a debate they push against the room instead: the reader’s Popularity rises sharply, half again an ordinary lift. Out of doors they cross what the road runs out at.
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).
Plunged Into a Greater Sin	Rationality	Argument	100	100%	10	Bayle’s whole answer to "compel them to come in," aimed straight at Augustine’s Letter 93 to Vincentius by name. A forced signature does not save the man who signs it — it only teaches him 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	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:
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 opens by lowering the bar honestly: certainty is for an infinite mind, and we do not have one. A prince raised in the tropics can reason his way to denying frost exists, from a lifetime of real evidence — and be wrong anyway. Acting on the weight of evidence we actually have, imperfect as it is, is not a concession. It is the only kind of reasoning finite creatures ever get.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
Sapere Aude	Presupposition	Argument	80	100%	99	Kant’s own motto for the whole age: think for yourself, and stop letting a book, a priest, or a physician do your thinking for you. Toland already quoted this essay once, elsewhere in the dream, without saying whose it was.
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 Is for Obedience	Presupposition	Argument	82	100%	99	Spinoza’s move that saves the text by demoting it: Scripture teaches obedience and love of neighbour, and nothing about the nature of things. Read it for morals, and let philosophy judge everything it says about the world.
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.
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	Not knowledge, not action — a third thing, prior to both, that Schleiermacher calls religion’s actual home. Doctrine and behaviour are downstream of it; get the feeling right and the doctrine can be argued about afterward.
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.
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 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.
Sole Imputation	Soteriology	Argument	95	100%	99	Trent naming the Protestant doctrine and condemning it by its own word. Righteousness is not CREDITED to a sinner from outside, it is POURED INTO him and becomes his own — which is why the two sides could not settle by finding a middle term. They meant different things by the verdict itself.
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.
Stronger Than Kings	Faith	Argument	78	100%	10	Leo III was pulling images down in Constantinople and John was at Mar Saba, outside the empire, under a caliph. He could say this because the Christian emperor could not reach him — which is a fact worth sitting with before deciding who was free.
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.
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	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 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 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 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	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 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 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 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 second move, and the sharper one: not "the eye is complicated," but that a fish’s lens and a land animal’s lens are curved to exactly the different degree each needs to bend light correctly underwater versus in air — the same calculation an instrument-maker would have to get right on purpose.
The Fashion to Be Daring	Rationality	Argument	70	100%	99	Pascal’s sharpest cut at the pose: it is not a conviction, it is a costume — heard about, admired, copied.
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 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 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’s move, and it comes before any witness is called. Nothing happens against the eternal order of nature; a report of something that did is therefore a report of something that did not happen. The number of witnesses never enters into it.
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 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	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 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 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 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 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 Hostile Witness	History	Argument	94	95%	5	Not a follower who got carried away. Paul was the prosecution, and he changed his testimony against his own interest — the one kind of witness a courtroom has always weighed heaviest, because he had everything to lose and nothing on offer for switching sides.
The Image of the Invisible	Christology	Argument	84	100%	10	John’s argument is Christological before it is anything else: he is not painting God, he is painting the flesh God took. Whether that answers the second commandment is the whole question, and this is the strongest form of the case that it does.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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’s whole book aimed at exactly Tindal’s kind of claim, and it does not defend revelation by making it tidier than nature. It shows the two stand or fall together: whatever apparent gaps, delays and roundabout means trouble a reader in revealed religion, the same shapes are already sitting in the natural world Tindal never doubted for a moment.
The Sceptre Ended	Exegesis	Argument	90	95%	99	Genesis 49, read against the church by a man who knows the text: the sceptre was David’s house, David’s house ended at Zedekiah, and Jesus is not of Judah by your own genealogies. This is not a sneer. It is exegesis, and it has to be answered as exegesis.
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 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 Stater in Its Mouth	Bible	Argument	20	100%	15	The coin that gave this whole dream’s money its name, and the fish carried it the entire time — a small, strange proof that provision does not always come from the direction you were 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 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 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 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 Tool Serves the Church	History	Argument	82	100%	15	The constructive half. The same criticism that unmasked the Donation is what gave the church a clean Greek New Testament under Erasmus. The tool is not the enemy. The frame you set it in decides which way it cuts.
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 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 own image for the whole problem: no report of a past event, however well attested, could ever be strong enough proof for a claim about eternal, necessary truth. A crowd of witnesses to a resurrection two thousand years ago is still only a historical report, and history — however solid — is, on his account, simply the wrong KIND of thing to found necessary truth on.
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 "it had lain there forever" is a fine enough answer. Find a watch there, and it isn’t — not because the watch is more mysterious, but because it is visibly FOR something, parts fitted to a purpose in a way rock never is. Paley’s whole argument is that a living eye fails the same test the same way.
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	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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Three Kinds of Music	Natural Theology	Argument	78	100%	15	De institutione musica names three: the music of the turning world — planets, seasons, the elements kept in ratio; the music of a human being — body and soul, reason and appetite, held in tune; and the music you actually hear. One order, sounding at three scales. A world you can set to a ratio is a world that was thought out.
Three Mysteries	Christology	Argument	82	100%	10	Ignatius keeps returning to silence — that God does the loudest things quietly — and this is where he says it plainest. Three events the powers of the world never saw coming, done without announcement, and then shouted.
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 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	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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 runs the oldest test in the church — held everywhere, always, by everyone — and runs it on religion in general instead of on doctrine. Whatever survives the comparison of all nations is true; whatever does not is priestcraft. It is Vincent of Lérins turned outward, and Herbert knew it.
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.
"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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.