Academic Seminar – 13th March // Rev. Dr. Lyndon Drake – ‘Scriptural authority and the literary history of the Old Testament’

Academic seminars focus on early-stage research on questions at the intersection of Christian faith and scholarly enquiry. They are intended to be exploratory, generative for both presenter and participants, and accessible across disciplines.

It is not uncommon for scholars of the Christian Bible to develop an interest in academic study motivated by their confessional commitments, only to encounter historical-critical findings that are dissonant with their religious tradition. This is especially true for evangelical Protestant Christians, for whom the Bible possesses a unique revelatory status and foundational authority in doctrinal statements (sometimes described in terms of inerrancy or infallibility) that make questions of strict historical reliability existential. The data about scriptural texts can in many (but not all) cases be made to cohere with a doctrinal statement, or left as a matter of mystery, but this can be experientially unsatisfactory. I propose an alternative approach where we start with the artefact of the Protestant Old Testament, and consider the data which can be observed about its origins, formation, compilation, and so forth. From the data, I will offer some constraints which need to be met by a doctrine which affords the Bible normative and authoritative status as Christian scripture for the church, while accounting for what is observable.

The Rev’d. Dr. Lyndon Drake is a Senior Research Fellow and the Chaplain at St. Edmund Hall, and Research Fellow in AI at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, all at the University of Oxford. He is the operational lead for the Oxford Collaboration on Theology and Artificial Intelligence. These roles follow on from a DPhil in Theology from Oxford (2023) on economics and writing in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from York (2005). Until 2024, he served as the Māori Anglican Archdeacon of Tāmaki Makaurau in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Lyndon also has degrees in science and commerce (Auckland) and two previous degrees in theology (Oxford), along with peer-reviewed publications in science and theology. Until 2010, Lyndon was a Vice President at Barclays Capital, trading interest-rate products. Since then, he has served in church ministry, as well as teaching theology and holding other leadership roles, including as chair of Te Whare Ruruhau o Meri Trust Board (a charity working to reduce family harm and sexual violence).