On the Christian Life
On the Christian Life — self-denial, the cross, and the future life (Institutes III.6–10, printed on its own)
John Calvin
The devotional heart of the Institutes, cut loose and pocket-sized, because it is the part a reader actually lived in.
- Catch rate
- 180 / 255
- Base research
- 236
- Stat total
- 248
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Five chapters, pulled out of the middle of a much larger book and printed alone because this was the part people wanted to carry.
It does not argue with an opponent. It tells a Christian how to live, and the demand it makes is total — which is its own kind of force.
Self-denial, patience under the cross, a mind set on the life to come. Little of it is new, and almost none of it can be answered without simply refusing it.
The most reprinted piece of Calvin there is, under a dozen borrowed titles in a dozen languages, because it is short and it is not about a controversy.
Cited for this book
Chapters six through ten of the 1539 Institutes: on the Christian life, self-denial, bearing the cross, meditation on the future life, and the right use of the present one. From early on they were extracted and printed by themselves, and they have stayed in print that way — under titles Calvin never gave them — more widely and for longer than the whole book they came from.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | We Are Not Our Own | Spirituality | Argument | 80 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 30 | Bearing the Cross | Spirituality | Argument | 74 | 100% | 10 |
| 38 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 40 | Rest | Spirituality | rest | — | 100% | 5 |
| 44 | Imputed Righteousness | Soteriology | Argument | 95 | 100% | 10 |