Argument

Argument from the Promise-Keeping Convergence

Intro

When you promise something today, the promise binds you tomorrow. The you-of-tomorrow may not feel like doing the thing, may not remember why you promised, may be tired or distracted or different in mood. The promise still binds. J.L. Austin noticed this in 1955 and built a whole new branch of philosophy on the idea. He called promises "performatives." A promise is not a statement that could be true or false. It is an act that changes the world. After you say "I promise," there is an obligation that did not exist before, and the obligation reaches forward in time across the version of you that did not exist when the promise was made. Hannah Arendt called this faculty "the faculty of making and keeping promises" and treated it as one of the two things that make politics possible at all.

Now read the Bible. God's whole way of dealing with humanity is structured by promises. The Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 15. The Davidic covenant in 2 Samuel 7. The new covenant in Jeremiah 31. Hebrews 6:13-18 explicitly says God swore by himself because there was no one greater to swear by. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man that he should lie. The biblical anthropology treats promise-keeping as something humans do because they bear the image of a covenant-keeping God. Austin in 1955 was working out the logic of how human speech acts bind across time. Hebrews 6 in around AD 65 was saying God's covenant-keeping is the paradigm of binding speech across time. Two disciplines, two thousand years apart, arrived at the same structural claim. That is the argument.

In full

Two independently-established structural features converge. First, the speech-act theory of promising: J.L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words (William James Lectures 1955, published 1962) established that certain speech acts ("I promise," "I bequeath," "I name this ship," "I declare war") are performatives that do not describe a state of affairs but create one. Austin's illocutionary act category, formalized by John Searle (Speech Acts, 1969), shows that promises are a paradigm-case of performative-speech: they create an obligation that did not exist before the speech act, and the obligation binds the speaker across time. Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958, ch. 33) recognized this as a structural feature of human existence: "the faculty of making and keeping promises" alongside the faculty of forgiveness is what allows politics to operate at all, by establishing islands of predictability in a sea of unpredictable human action. Second, the biblical-covenantal theology of promise: across the canonical witness, God's relation to humanity is structured as a series of unbreakable covenants. The Abrahamic (Gen 15; Gen 17), Mosaic (Exodus 19-24), Davidic (2 Sam 7), and new (Jer 31:31-34; Luke 22:20) covenants form the structural backbone of Scripture. Heb 6:13-18 makes the meta-claim explicit: God swore by himself because there was no one greater; the unchangeability of God's promise is the paradigm-case of binding-speech across time. The two domains converge: in both, promise creates obligation that did not exist before; in both, the obligation binds the speaker across the changes time brings; in both, promise-keeping is constitutive of personhood-in-time, not incidental to it. The convergence is anomalous on naturalism and predicted by classical Christian theism.

Argument structure

Form

Convergence-shaped with a covenant-theology landing. P1 + P2 establish the speech-act side; P3 names the naturalist anomaly. P4 establishes the biblical-covenantal side. P5 identifies the structural isomorphism. P6 prices the rival worldviews. The inference at C is abductive: among live worldview options, classical Christian theism with the covenant-keeping God + imago Dei uniquely predicts the cross-time-binding force of promise because that is what the covenant-keeping God's image-bearing creatures would have. Soundness is contemporary: speech-act theory is the consensus framework in philosophy of language since Austin and Searle; biblical-covenantal theology is canonical and creedally formalized. The cross-domain formulation as a stand-alone theistic argument is, to the maintainer's knowledge, not in the published natural-theology literature (2026-06-15), although Wolterstorff (Divine Discourse 1995) and Vanhoozer (Remythologizing Theology 2010) develop adjacent material.

P1, Promises are performative speech acts that create obligations

Affirmative case

1. Austin's 1955 William James Lectures established the performative-speech category. How to Do Things With Words (published 1962) distinguished constatives (statements that could be true or false) from performatives (utterances that do something rather than report something). The paradigm-cases: "I promise," "I bequeath," "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," "I do" (in a wedding), "I declare war." These do not describe states of affairs; they create them.
2. Searle (1969) formalized the framework into illocutionary acts. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language organized the performative-category into a taxonomy (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, declarations) and identified the commissive class (promises, vows, oaths, contracts) as the speech acts that commit the speaker to a future course of action. The speech act is constitutive of the commitment; the commitment did not exist before the speech act.
3. The framework has held the field for sixty years. Vanderveken (Meaning and Speech Acts, 1990-1991), Searle's own The Construction of Social Reality (1995), and the broader analytic-philosophy-of-language literature treat the speech-act account of promising as the consensus position. Even contestable refinements (Bach and Harnish's intentionalist version; Stalnaker's pragmatic version) preserve the core feature: promise creates obligation that did not exist before.

Anticipated objections

1. "Promises are conventional; the obligation is a social construction, not a metaphysical effect."
2. "The 'speech-act creates obligation' framework collapses on closer inspection: the obligation is just a mental state of the speaker plus a social-cognition state of the audience."

Rebuttals

1. The conventional-construction reading is the weaker form of the speech-act theory and Searle himself addressed it in The Construction of Social Reality (1995): social-conventional facts are real facts about the world that did not exist before the speech act. Calling them "constructed" does not erase their existence; it identifies the mechanism of their existence. The argument does not need to defend a Platonic obligation-realism; it needs to establish that the speech act creates something that binds the speaker across time. Both the conventional and the realist readings of speech-act theory affirm this.
2. The mental-state-plus-social-cognition reduction is the standard naturalist response and it shrinks under cases. The dead-letter case: a promise made in writing whose recipient dies before reading it, but the promiser still feels bound. The amnesiac case: the promiser forgets the promise but remains bound when reminded. The cross-generational case: a promise made to one's-future-children. None of these fit cleanly into the mental-state-plus-social-cognition reduction. The structural-binding feature of promise exceeds what the reductive account predicts.

Live-cite kit

• Scholarly: J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford, 1962, lectures 1955); John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1969); Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995); Daniel Vanderveken, Meaning and Speech Acts 2 vols (Cambridge, 1990-1991).
• Aphorism: "Austin's discovery was simple and seismic. Some speech does not describe the world; it changes the world. 'I promise' is the paradigm-case. The obligation it creates did not exist before the speaking."

Tactical notes

• The conventional-construction objection is the first move; have Searle's Construction of Social Reality by name.
• Force-commit: "On any analytic theory of speech-acts available today, does 'I promise' create an obligation that did not exist before? The consensus answer is yes."

P2, The obligation binds across time

Affirmative case

1. The cross-time-binding force of promise is the structural feature Arendt named. The Human Condition (1958), chapter 33: "the faculty of making and keeping promises" is paired with the faculty of forgiveness as the two human capacities that make political life possible. Arendt: "Without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart."
2. Promise binds across psychological change. The promising-self and the keeping-self may have substantively different moods, memories, circumstances, and immediate desires. The promise binds them as the same agent. This is what the legal-philosophical tradition of contract presupposes (Fried, Contract as Promise, 1981); legal contracts are enforceable because the cross-time-binding force of promise is taken to be a real feature of human agency.
3. The cross-time-binding force is universal across human cultures. Anthropological treatments of pact-making (Westermarck The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas 1906-1908; Levi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship 1949 on marriage-as-pact) document the universality. No human society treats promises as merely-conventional verbiage with no cross-time-binding force.

Anticipated objections

1. "The cross-time-binding force is a normative claim; descriptively, people break promises all the time. The 'binding' is aspirational, not metaphysical."
2. "Future-self-binding can be explained by predictive cognition: I promise because I predict my future self will want to honor the commitment."

Rebuttals

1. The argument does not deny that people break promises; it observes that breaking a promise is recognized as a moral failure even when the breaker no longer feels bound by the original commitment. The recognition that the promise should have bound across time is the structural feature. People who break promises feel guilt or are held accountable; people who never promised are not held to the same standard. The asymmetry is the data; the binding-force is what produces the asymmetry.
2. The predictive-cognition account fails on the strongest cases. The cross-generational-promise (a promise to descendants who do not yet exist); the dead-letter promise (whose recipient cannot enforce); the secret-promise (whose audience cannot reciprocate); the deathbed-promise (which the promiser cannot themselves keep). These cases preserve binding-force without the predictive-cognition mechanism. The reductive account shrinks under the strongest data-points.

Live-cite kit

• Scholarly: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), ch. 33; Charles Fried, Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation (Harvard, 1981); Niko Kolodny and R. Jay Wallace, "Promises and Practices Revisited," Philosophy and Public Affairs 31:2 (2003); Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (Macmillan, 1906-1908).
• Aphorism: "Arendt named it: 'the faculty of making and keeping promises.' She paired it with forgiveness as the two things that make politics possible. Both run against the natural flow of time; both are how persons hold identity across the years."

P3, The cross-time-binding force is anomalous on naturalism

Affirmative case

1. The "same agent" thesis is contested on naturalism. Hume's bundle theory (Treatise I.IV.6) treats the self as a series of perceptions with no underlying substance; Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) develops the reductive personal-identity view in which there is no deep further fact about which future-person is me. On these accounts, the promising-agent and the keeping-agent are at best loosely-connected stages, not the same agent. The cross-time-binding force of promise presupposes a persisting agent that the reductive accounts strain to ground.
2. Evolutionary-cognition accounts capture some of the data and miss the binding-force. Reciprocal-altruism (Trivers 1971) explains some promise-keeping as repeated-game strategy; indirect-reciprocity (Nowak and Sigmund 2005) explains some promise-keeping as reputation-management. These accounts work for visible promises in iterated games. They fail for the dead-letter promise, the cross-generational promise, the secret promise, the deathbed promise. The naturalist explanation captures the easy cases and shrinks on the hard ones.
3. The promise-keeping faculty does not erode under naturalist-cultural commitment. Avowedly-naturalist individuals continue to make and feel bound by promises; the cross-time-binding force survives the worldview-shift. This is empirically observed but theoretically anomalous on naturalism: if the binding-force were purely-conventional, removing the convention should erode the binding; it does not.

Anticipated objections

1. "Hume's bundle theory is not the only naturalist option; biological-continuity accounts (Olson) preserve the persisting agent."
2. "The naturalist anomaly is overstated; promise-keeping is just trained-cognitive-behavior with selective-pressure-grounding."

Rebuttals

1. Biological-continuity accounts (Olson, The Human Animal, 1997) preserve a biological persisting agent without preserving a psychological persisting agent. The promise-keeping requires the psychological-and-moral persisting agent (the person who promised must be the same person who feels bound and is held accountable). The biological-continuity move dodges the structural difficulty; it does not resolve it. The full naturalist account requires psychological persistence, which Hume and Parfit have made philosophically difficult.
2. The trained-cognitive-behavior reading collapses on the cases the predictive-cognition rebuttal already covered (dead-letter, cross-generational, secret, deathbed). The naturalist anomaly is well-documented in the philosophical literature; it is not an apologetic invention.

Live-cite kit

• Scholarly: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), I.IV.6 on personal identity; Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), Parts III-IV; Eric Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychological Continuity (Oxford, 1997).
• Aphorism: "On Hume's bundle theory or Parfit's reductive account, the agent who promised yesterday and the agent who is bound today are loosely-connected stages. Promise-keeping presupposes that they are the same. Naturalism strains to ground the presupposition."

P4, Biblical-covenantal theology articulates the cross-time-binding-speech structure

Affirmative case

1. The canonical Scripture is structured around covenants. Abrahamic (Gen 15 + Gen 17): God commits to Abraham's descendants becoming a great nation, inheriting the land, blessing the world. Mosaic (Exodus 19-24): covenant ratified at Sinai with the blood of the covenant. Davidic (2 Sam 7): a son of David on the throne forever. New (Jer 31:31-34; Luke 22:20; Heb 8): God's law written on the heart, sins remembered no more, ratified in Christ's blood. The covenants are not incidental to biblical theology; they are its structural backbone.
2. Heb 6:13-18 makes the meta-claim explicit. "For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself... that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation." God's promise has unchangeable character; the structural feature being articulated is that promise binds the promiser absolutely, and God's promise is the paradigm-case of such binding.
3. Num 23:19 articulates the divine promise-keeping nature. "God is not a man, that he should lie, neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" The text contrasts divine and human promise-keeping by degree, not by kind: humans break their word; God does not. The structural feature (promise-binds-speaker-across-time) is the same; the divine instance is the paradigm-case.
4. Christological deepening. Luke 22:20: "this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you." Christ is the embodiment of God's covenant-keeping; the Eucharistic memorial is a speech-act (the anamnesis) in which the cross-time-binding force of the new covenant is renewed in time. The sacramental tradition treats Eucharist as performative-speech; the speech-act category developed by Austin in 1955 was articulated theologically a thousand years earlier in the eucharistic-and-covenantal tradition.

Anticipated objections

1. "The biblical-covenantal pattern is theological-mythology; importing it to explain the philosophy of promising is anachronistic."
2. "The 'God cannot lie' claim is dogmatic; you cannot use it as a premise in an argument for the very theology it presupposes."

Rebuttals

1. The argument is not "if you already accept biblical covenant-theology, promise-keeping makes sense." The argument is convergence-shaped: the speech-act side (P1-P3) is established independently by Austin, Searle, Arendt, and the analytic-philosophy literature with no biblical-theology agenda. The biblical-covenantal side (P4) is canonical and creedally formalized with no speech-act-theory agenda. The two domains arrived at the same structural claim by independent paths separated by approximately two thousand years. The argument identifies the convergence as evidence; it does not assume the conclusion.
2. The "God cannot lie" claim is not used as a premise in the argument; it is identified as a structural feature of biblical theology that the argument observes. The argument then asks: which worldview predicts the convergence between this structural feature and the empirical-philosophical analysis of human promise-binding? Theism with the covenant-keeping God + imago Dei predicts it; naturalism does not. The argument is conditional-comparative, not circular.

Live-cite kit

• Scriptural: Gen 15; Gen 17; 2 Sam 7; Jer 31:31-34; Luke 22:20; Heb 6:13-18; Heb 8; Num 23:19.
• Scholarly / theological: Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology 2 vols (Oxford, 1997-1999); Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge, 2010); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge, 1995); Michael Horton, Introducing Covenant Theology (Baker, 2009).
• Aphorism: "Hebrews 6:13-18 says God swore by himself because there was no one greater. That is the paradigm-case of binding-speech-across-time. Austin discovered the same structural feature in human promise in 1955; the biblical-theological tradition articulated it for the divine promise two thousand years earlier."

P5, The two domains are isomorphic

Affirmative case

1. Speech-act creates obligation. Austin-Searle: "I promise" creates an obligation that did not exist before. Biblical: God's covenant-speech creates a binding relation that did not exist before. The constitutive-speech-act feature matches.
2. Obligation binds across time. Austin-Searle: the promise binds the speaker through psychological change. Biblical: God's covenant binds across generations, through Israel's unfaithfulness, through exile, through the changes of history. The cross-time-binding feature matches.
3. Persisting-agent presupposition. Austin-Searle: the promising-agent and the keeping-agent must be the same agent for the promise to bind. Biblical: God's covenant-keeping is grounded in God's immutability (Mal 3:6 "I am the LORD, I change not"; Heb 13:8 "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever"). The persisting-agent feature matches.
4. Constitutive-of-identity. Austin-Searle: promise-keeping is constitutive of moral personhood; promise-breaking is identity-eroding. Biblical: God's identity is covenant-keeper; the covenant-name (YHWH) is associated with God's faithful-presence-across-time. Imago Dei humans are constituted as promise-keepers because they image the covenant-keeping God.

Anticipated objections

1. "The structural-match is loose; you are reading the analytic-philosophy with the biblical-theology in mind."

Rebuttals

1. The four features are testable independently in each domain by readers with no cross-domain agenda. Austin (1955) was a secular philosopher of language; Searle and Vanderveken developed the framework without theological reference. The biblical-covenantal pattern is canonical and was articulated by writers (the Pentateuchal sources, the Deuteronomistic Historian, Jeremiah, the author of Hebrews) with no analytic-philosophy-of-language agenda. The two domains were developed independently; their structural match is empirical, not interpretively imposed.

Live-cite kit

• Scholarly: Vanhoozer 2010 on the doctrine-of-God as covenant-speaking-agent; Jenson 1997 on naming and identity.
• Aphorism: "Four features in two domains, established independently by readers with no cross-domain agenda, line up. The structural match is empirical."

P6, Naturalism cannot ground the convergence; Christian theism uniquely can

Affirmative case

1. On naturalism, the cross-time-binding force of promise is unexplained (engaged in P3). Hume-Parfit reductive personal-identity strains to ground the persisting-agent that promise presupposes; evolutionary-cognition models capture the easy cases and shrink on the hard ones.
2. On generic theism, the convergence is mildly predicted. A theistic creator might design humans with promise-keeping capacity. But generic theism does not predict the biblical-covenantal pattern of unbreakable promise-as-the-structure-of-divine-relation.
3. On classical Christian theism with the covenant-keeping God + imago Dei, the convergence is exactly what is predicted. Humans bear the image of a God whose promises are unbreakable (Heb 6:18 "it is impossible for God to lie"). The cross-time-binding force of human promise is the imprint of the eternal-covenant-keeping nature on creaturely existence. The structural match with the speech-act analysis is what the imago Dei doctrine predicts.
4. The Christological deepening. Luke 22:20: "this cup is the new covenant in my blood." Christ is the embodied paradigm of covenant-keeping. The Eucharistic anamnesis renews the promise across time in performative speech. This Christological-and-sacramental development is unique to Christianity; Unitarian-monotheisms (Islam, Judaism) have covenant-language but lack the Christological-embodiment of the covenant-keeping pattern.

Anticipated objections

1. "Islam has covenant-language; the convergence is not Christian-specific."
2. "Even granting Christian theism predicts the convergence, the prediction is post-hoc; the doctrine was developed before Austin's speech-act theory."

Rebuttals

1. Islamic covenant-language exists but lacks the Christological-embodiment of covenant-keeping that Christianity supplies. The new covenant in Christ's blood is the paradigm of cross-time-binding-speech-act made flesh; this is what Islam lacks. The convergence-argument runs cleanest on Christian-specific anchors (the Christological-Eucharistic frame), not generic monotheism.
2. The post-hoc objection misreads convergence arguments. The biblical-covenantal pattern was developed by canonical authors c. 1400 BC to AD 95 with no access to Austinian speech-act theory; Austin (1955) had no biblical-theology agenda. The two domains developed independently. The argument identifies the convergence and asks which worldview predicts it; the predictive-fit favors Christian theism.

Live-cite kit

• Scholarly: Vanhoozer 2010; Wolterstorff 1995; Horton 2009 on covenant theology; Jenson 1997 on the doctrine of God as covenant-speaking-agent.
• Aphorism: "On naturalism, promise binding across time is anomalous. On Christian theism, it is the imprint of the covenant-keeping God on image-bearing creatures. The structural-match with Austin is what the imago Dei doctrine predicts."

Tactical notes

• The Islam-has-covenant rebuttal is the most common move; have the Christological-embodiment distinction ready.
• Force-commit: "On a strict-naturalist account, why does yesterday's speech act bind today's agent across psychological change? Promise-keeping requires the persisting-agent that Hume and Parfit have made philosophically difficult. Theism supplies the grounding; naturalism strains."

Tactical opening and closing

Opening (debate floor)

"J.L. Austin gave the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955 and showed that some speech does not describe the world; it changes the world. 'I promise' is the paradigm. The obligation it creates did not exist before the speaking, and the obligation binds the speaker across time, through changes of mood and memory and circumstance. Hannah Arendt called this 'the faculty of making and keeping promises' and treated it as one of the two things that make politics possible. Hebrews 6:13-18 says God swore by himself because there was no one greater to swear by. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man that he should lie. The biblical-covenantal tradition has been articulating the same structural feature, divine promise binding across time, for three thousand years. Two disciplines, two thousand years apart, arrived at the same structural shape. That is the argument."

Closing (live cite)

"Naturalism strains to ground the persisting agent that promise presupposes. Hume's bundle theory and Parfit's reductive personal-identity make the cross-time-binding force philosophically difficult. Christian theism predicts it: humans bear the image of a covenant-keeping God whose word does not return void; the cross-time-binding force of human promise is the imprint of the divine promise-keeping nature. The new covenant in Christ's blood is the paradigm of binding-speech-made-flesh. Austin discovered the structural feature in 1955; Hebrews 6 articulated it for the divine instance two thousand years earlier. The convergence is the argument."

See also

• Ris3n Arguments, the master index of convergence-shaped arguments
• Argument from the Naming Convergence, sister-argument on rigid-designation speech-act
• Argument from the Confession-Catharsis Convergence, sister-argument on confessional speech-act
• Argument from Twin Asymmetries, sister-argument on forgiveness-as-Arendtian-paired-faculty
• Covenant Theology, the doctrinal anchor
• Imago Dei, the cross-domain image-bearing anchor
• Cumulative Case for Christian Theism, the meta-argument these feed into

Common questions this page answers

Q: What is the Argument from the Promise-Keeping Convergence?

It is a convergence-shaped argument for classical Christian theism that takes two independently-established structural features of reality and shows their isomorphism. The first is J.L. Austin's speech-act analysis of promising (1955/1962): "I promise" is a performative that creates an obligation that did not exist before the speech act, and the obligation binds the speaker across psychological change in time, as Hannah Arendt named in The Human Condition (1958). The second is the biblical-covenantal theology of promise across the Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, and new covenants, climaxing in Heb 6:13-18's meta-claim that God swore by himself because there was no one greater, and Num 23:19 "God is not a man that he should lie." The two domains converge on the same structural claim about cross-time-binding-speech, two thousand years apart and from completely independent disciplines.

Q: Why does this require Christian theism specifically rather than generic theism?

Generic theism predicts that a creator might design humans with promise-keeping capacity. Christian-Trinitarian theism uniquely predicts the Christological embodiment of the covenant-keeping pattern: Luke 22:20 "this cup is the new covenant in my blood." Christ is the embodied paradigm of cross-time-binding-speech-made-flesh, and the Eucharistic anamnesis renews the promise across time in performative speech. This Christological-and-sacramental development is unique to Christianity; Unitarian-monotheisms have covenant-language but lack the Christ-as-embodied-covenant pattern.

Q: Why is promise-keeping anomalous on naturalism?

The cross-time-binding force of promise presupposes a persisting agent who is the same yesterday-when-promising and today-when-bound. Hume's bundle theory (Treatise I.IV.6) and Derek Parfit's reductive personal-identity in Reasons and Persons (1984) make this presupposition philosophically difficult on naturalism: the self is a series of perceptions or loosely-connected stages with no deep further fact about identity. Reciprocal-altruism and indirect-reciprocity evolutionary-cognition models explain some promise-keeping as repeated-game strategy, but they fail on the dead-letter promise (whose recipient cannot enforce), the cross-generational promise, the secret promise, and the deathbed promise. The structural feature exceeds what the naturalist accounts predict.

Q: How is this different from the Naming Convergence and the Confession-Catharsis Convergence?

All three are linguistic-convergence arguments that pair an analytic-philosophy-of-language framework with biblical-theological-anthropology. The Naming Convergence pairs Kripke's rigid-designation thesis with biblical naming-theology; the focus is identity-fixing-naming. The Confession-Catharsis Convergence pairs Pennebaker's expressive-writing paradigm with biblical-confessional pattern; the focus is externalized-disclosure-before-witness. The Promise-Keeping Convergence pairs Austin-Searle speech-act theory with biblical-covenantal theology; the focus is binding-speech-across-time. The three are sibling arguments that triangulate on the imago Dei anchor from independent linguistic-and-anthropological starting points.

Q: Is this argument original to this codex?

Austin and Searle's speech-act theory is canonical analytic philosophy. The biblical-covenantal theology is canonical Christian doctrine. Adjacent integrations exist (Vanhoozer's Remythologizing Theology 2010; Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse 1995). What is novel to this codex (2026-06-15) is the formalization as a debate-prep convergence argument, with the four-feature structural-isomorphism developed point-by-point and the Hume-Parfit naturalist-anomaly + the Christological-Eucharistic Christian-specificity made explicit. The argument as a stand-alone named theistic argument has, to the maintainer's knowledge, not been published in this form.