Command, example and necessary inference is the movement's hermeneutic and it is taught explicitly, which is unusual — most traditions apply a method without naming it. A practice is authorised if the New Testament commands it, if an approved apostolic example shows it, or if it follows necessarily from what is written. The difficulties are obvious and have been argued for two centuries: which examples bind and which are incidental, how far necessary inference may run, and whether the absence of a prohibition is an authorisation. In the twentieth century a substantial body of Church of Christ scholarship, particularly around Abilene Christian University and Pepperdine, moved toward reading the New Testament as narrative and theology rather than as a legal constitution, and the resulting fight between the pattern and the story readings is the live intellectual argument in the movement now.