Across the Universe and Interpreting the Bible

So on my way home from my vacation in Santa Barbara, my younger two sons and I were listening to the soundtrack to Across the Universe.  In case you haven't seen it, Across the Universe is a musical made for film directed by Julie Taymor in 2007.  Very creatively, the film tells a love story about Jude, a young shipworker from Liverpool, his college drop out friend Max, and Max's sister and Jude's love interest Lucy.  The film then patches together a story using 34 different Beatles songs.  Taymor takes songs originally written to refer to one thing (variously by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison) and morphs the song meanings to weave a different story, all without changing any of the lyrics.  Some of the scenes are a little contrived, like a nun prematurely pronouncing soldiers dead in a VA hospital ward just to make meaning of the lyric "Mother superior jumped the gun."  But others are marvelously satisfying, as the morphed lyrics are shifted to create a narrative about three young people coming of age.  In particular "Let it Be" and "Hey Jude" stand out as deeply satisfying and creative scenes. 

Being a theologian of sorts, this leads me to think strange thoughts.  What Taymor has done is something that some biblical scholars have been saying we do with the Bible.  You see, some post foundational biblical scholars have questioned whether it's possible or even preferable to try to recover any "intended meaning" from the biblical texts.  After all, how can we really know exactly what Paul was thinking when he wrote Romans or any other author of scripture.  Much like we can't sit John Lennon down and ask him what he really meant when he wrote "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and we can't recover the intended meaning of "Here Comes the Sun" because we can't ask George Harrison, how can we know what the biblical authors were thinking? We can guess and speculate.  But can we really know? 

So since the post foundationalist turn, some scholars are saying that the best we can do with any text (be it the Bible or a Beatles's song) is play with it.  Since we can't "know" what it means, we create it's meaning in playful ways.  That's essentially what Taymor has done with Beatles songs in Across the Universe.  She's playfully morphed the meanings of these songs to weave a fun love story.  It's a deeply satisfying outcome, and honestly has introduced the music of the Beatles to a whole new generation.  My younger boys developed an appreciation for Beatles music through Across the Universe. 

As satisfied as I am with this hermeneutic in Across the Universe, I'm ambivalent about it in biblical studies.  Even if we can't have complete knowledge of Paul's intention in Romans and the author/redactor's intention in Luke or Matthew, I remain hopeful that we can ascertain the "gist" of their meanings.  In N T Wright's words, I am not a naive realist anymore but neither have I become an antirealist.  I remain a "critical realist," that is, striving to better understand the meaning of the text as I have it.  Part of this comes from my theology of the Bible, that I believe it to be Scripture, and therefore in some sense inspired and authoritative for the spiritual life and life of the church.