I was invited to make a presentation on scripture at a recent Miqra event put together by the youth leaders of the Diocese of Chicago. Below is a slightly expanded version with links:

Introduction
Reading scripture, according to the great 2nd century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons, is like configuring a mosaic of precious jewels. That mosaic can be configured in more ways than one. According to Irenaeus, it can be configured to reveal a portrait of the King – Jesus Christ as the Church knows him – or it can be configured, as it was by heretics and other false teachers, as something else, say a fox. More

Part 2: Among other things, honoring the scriptures means we must attend o the kinds of texts they are rather than impose theories of what we think they should be if they are inspired and authoritative. More

Part 3: Can we identify some guidelines or criteria by which we evaluate more faithful biblical configurations from less faithful or even faithless interpretations? Not all configurations are faithful. Not all faithful configurations are equally faithful. But there might be a range of recognizably, more or less, faithful configurations. The following criteria, based on how the canon of scripture came to be accepted and how the early Church read the Bible, are suggested to assist in configuring the mosaic of scripture. More

1. The Criterion of Jesus Christ
2. The Criterion of Love
3. The Criterion of the Rule of Faith
4. The Criterion of the Church’s Prayer
5. The Criterion of the Church’s Tradition
6. The Criterion of Comprehensiveness
7. The Criterion of Dissimilarity
8. The Criterion of Community
9. The Criterion of Character

No one criterion is adequate and no set of criteria will assure agreement on particular questions of interpretation. But, an interplay of the above criteria would provide a broad measure of relative faithfulness as we seek to configure an image of the King rather than a fox or a dog.

These are criteria that make sense to me. What might be some I am missing?
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Nicely done Matt.  I think the only place I’d pick a bone is confining tradition to the first five centuries.

Thanks, Mike. I would agree that Tradition is not confined to the first five centuries. But, it is the case that historically Angilcanism has weighted more authority to those early centuries. While Andrewes’ formual is the classic expression, it shows up regularly elsewhere. Francis J. Hall in his volume on Authority posits the “Patristic literature” as “constituting a valuable means for checking the content of tradition in later ages”. And Charles Gore says much the same explicity as well as in method. As does Michael Ramsey.