Appeal: homologia
From Jay Dyer vs Pedro from Crucible Debate: Sola Scriptura and Protestantism.
- #145141:14upheld by the moderator Jay Dyer against Pedro agonisma: homologia (+3) graded from 1 to 3 points
The moderator upheld the call: Jay Dyer earned 3.6 points.
“… what was Augustine's canon of scripture?”
Diogenes: One question forced the concession that the father Pedro was citing as his witness held a different canon from his own ("It was not mine. It was the Apocrypha"), which undercuts using Augustine to establish the sufficiency of a scripture whose extent the two men do not share.The archon upheld it at 3 points; the referee had filed it at 1.
- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Pedro's opening and standing position was that scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith and that the church's canon-list, though fallible, reliably tracks the true canon; using Augustine as a supporting witness for that continuity is part of that project, and this concession that Augustine's actual canon differed from his own is a genuine, unretracted admission against that interest, not a restatement of it. Jay pressed a direct question ("What was Augustine's canon of scripture?") after Pedro had cited Augustine as a supporting witness; Pedro's answer, "It was not mine. It was the apocrypha," is an explicit, unhedged concession that his own chief patristic witness held a broader canon than Pedro's own Protestant canon. This is against Pedro's interest (he was trying to use Augustine to bolster his sola scriptura case) and he does not walk it back afterward — later in the debate he continues citing Augustine but never revisits or retracts this admission. A concession forced by a direct question, granted plainly, is exactly what homologia names.
- Socrates overturn: Read blind, found nothing worth calling. This is simply a pointed factual cross-examination question—relevant and fair, since it tests whether Pedro's earlier appeal to Augustine as a sola scriptura ally is consistent with the fact that Augustine's actual canon differed from Pedro's own. It isn't a fallacy (no substitution for an answer, no irrelevance), but it also isn't itself an explicit argument, clarification of a term, or steelman—it's just a well-aimed question whose payoff (Pedro's concession about the Apocrypha) is already credited at 41:18. Nothing further to flag here.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Jay Dyer has held since the opening that patristic citation, including Augustine, supports Orthodox continuity rather than Reformed sola scriptura, and has repeatedly flagged Pedro's Augustine quotes as "quote mining"; this exchange is the concrete cash-out of that standing charge via direct question and answer. Jay pressed a specific, narrow question ("What was Augustine's canon of scripture?") and Pedro directly answered with a genuine concession that undercuts his own repeated use of Augustine quotes (at 36:57, 39:47, 98:53, 99:27) as patristic support for his sola scriptura position: if Augustine's canon included the Apocrypha, Pedro cannot cleanly appeal to Augustine's authority on scripture's sufficiency while rejecting the very books Augustine counted as scripture. This is a real forced admission on a point of substance, not a restatement of something already conceded in the same terms — it specifically closes off Pedro's Augustine-quoting strategy that he continued to lean on afterward.
- Thesmothetes leave: Pedro's "It was not mine. It was the apocrypha" is an undisputed factual concession in his own words, so this is not a case of the judges completing an unstated link for him. The real split is over significance: Aristotle and Plato read it as a genuine capitulation that undercuts Pedro's use of Augustine, while Socrates reads it as just one well-aimed question in an ongoing exchange, not the kind of decisive, exchange-ending moment the duel catalogue reserves for homologia. That is a judgment call about weight and centrality that none of the enumerated rules settles, so it is left to the archon.
- Moderator uphold: Ruled by the archon, 10 October 2026: Jay forced the concession that Augustine's canon was not Pedro's, had said in the debate that sola scriptura needs a settled canon (28:57), and said what the concession does to Pedro's use of Augustine (87:36); 3 points by the ladder.
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