NOTES for Luk 24:45
What does a person need in order to read the Bible? Interest? Yes, of course, first of all interest, otherwise there is nothing to discuss: if there is no interest, a person will not take the book into his hands. But the ability to read is also needed. What, in essence, is a text, any text: literary, artistic, musical?
Meanings embodied in signs. In words, if we are speaking of a literary work. In words that are never unambiguous, unless, of course, the matter concerns terms, but the Bible is not a theological or philosophical book; there are no terms in it. Every literary work is a system of meanings embodied in words. And the reader has to reproduce these meanings, to re-create them, to build anew the system created by the author.
For meanings cannot be read off the way information is read from some medium on which it has been recorded. They can only be restored, re-created after the author, by passing along his path. Of course, not exactly as they were created or opened to the author, for copying is impossible here. Every reading of a text becomes its interpretation, whether the reader wants this or not, whether he realizes it or remains unaware, imagining that he "reads what is written."
And this is always so, in every case, with any literary work. And if there is not one author? If there are two: the person who created the text and God, who inspired it? One cannot read a text, cannot re-create meanings, without experiencing interest in the author, in the one through whom the meanings were opened. And if the meanings were opened not by a human being, if they were opened to him by another Author, and the human being only expressed and embodied them?
Then without interest in the Author with a capital letter, the main thing cannot be understood. To understand the Bible means to understand God. And, of course, the people through whom He spoke as well. This is the understanding Jesus taught His disciples. For God is easiest to understand at His home, in His Kingdom. And the people through whom He spoke are easiest to understand through the Human Being in whom He was incarnate. Then revelation and life are joined, and the word of God becomes comprehensible to the end through the "Word made flesh."