CENI: Communication or Interpretation

Every six months or so, it seems there is an attack on “CENI.”  Opponents decry this “intellectual relic from an earlier time.”   We are told we need a “new hermeneutic” or a “Jesus-centered approach” to face the issues of the 21^st century. Just this month, the Christian magazine Pressing On published a special edition entitled, “The CENI Crisis¹.”  It focuses on the challenges presented by the book Searching for the Pattern, by Lipscomb University professor John Mark Hicks.  So, why all the uproar and why should any of us care?

For many of you, the preceding paragraph is filled with phrases with which you may be unfamiliar or even uninterested.  My prayer is this attempt to clarify these issues will arm the Christian in the pew with a firm understanding of how we read and interpret the Bible.

Let’s start with CENI.  It is an acronym for Command, Example, and Necessary Inference.  It is mistakenly referred to as “our hermeneutic.”  It is neither a hermeneutic nor does it belong to churches of Christ.  CENI is how we understand any and everything communicated by humans.  When we speak, write, or illustrate an idea to someone else, they understand us because we either tell (command), show (example), or imply (infer) what we mean to them².   It is how we understand any and all communication.  It is not a hermeneutic.

For those of us within the Stone-Campbell movement, we are familiar with the phrases, “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak, and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.”-Thomas Campbell (1809), and “We neither add to nor take away from the word of God (Deuteronomy 4:2; I Corinthians 4:6).”  They reflect our respect for the Bible as the final and only source of authority in Christ’s church.  When we look for the will of God on any subject, we want to know what we have been told, shown, or what can be inferred from the inspired word of God.  CENI is just shorthand for how we assemble the teaching on any subject to which we wish to comply as children of God.  CENI is how we determine what God has actually expressed on a subject.

This is the problem for those who claim we need a new way of understanding Scripture.  The Bible can be read and understood.  If you are looking to change the teaching of the church or how it functions, clear Scripture opposing what you want accepted or taught is, shall we say, problematic.

And here we have come to the real conflict.  If someone wants to include women as teachers in the assembly of the church or even as overseers of a local congregation, the Bible clearly forbids those things (I Corinthians 14:34-35; I Timothy 2:11-13; 3:2; Titus 1:6).  As surely as night follows day, most of those advocating for female church leadership are just as motivated to do away with congregational singing (Ephesians 5:18-21; Colossians 3:16-17) and to include those who practice homosexual relations or even same-sex marriage (I Corinthians 6:9; I Timothy 1:10).

The attack on CENI is not an assault on how churches of Christ understand the word of God.  It is an attempt to remove the word of God from the discussion entirely.  We are told we need to think of the Scriptures from a “Jesus-centered” perspective.  With this, we agree.  It is our Lord who asked the religious leaders of his time, “What is written in the Law?  How do you read it?” in Luke 10:26 and approved of their use of CENI to understand God’s will in verse 28, “You have answered correctly.”

I mentioned earlier, CENI is not a hermeneutic.  That word means, “a method of interpretation” or “the study of the general principles of biblical interpretation.”  We use CENI to gather what the Bible records for us on any subject.  We use a hermeneutic to determine the meaning of any text based on the context in which it is used.  Who wrote it?  To whom was it written?  Is it from the Old or New Testament? etc.

Those of us within churches of Christ, have used a “common-sense hermeneutic” to understand God’s will and it has and does serve us well.  It is grounded in the thinking of what historians call the Enlightenment (1600-1800).  The Enlightenment is also referred to as the Age of Reason.  And so, we take what God’s words are and interpret them using reason.  We do not rely on a church counsel or creed to understand it for us. By an application of reason, logic, and an empirical approach to the Bible, we understand the meaning of the text with no bias or discrimination.

This approach is also called a historical-grammatical method.  In other words, “What did the author intend to communicate to his original audience?”  How do culture, history, or literary style effect our understanding of that meaning?

We should never shrink from an attitude of, “God says it.  I believe it.  That settles it.”  God created us.  He has communicated his will to us.  As Hebrews 4:12 reads, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.”  The problem is not that some passages are difficult, but that most are simply understood.  Those are the ones we sometimes find a little too pointy for our liking.

¹  Roberts, Mark ed. “The CENI Crisis.” Pressing On, Oct. 2023.

²  I owe a debt to preacher and Florida College professor Doy Moyer on this subject.  His writing is included in Pressing On and is always informative.  He was the first person I heard describe CENI as “tell, show, imply.”