The claim of biblical authority is not difficult as it pertains to the main affirmation of apostolic faith.  But from that base line, the hard, disputatious work is interpretation that needs to be recognized precisely for what it is:  nothing other than interpretation.  The Bible, our mothers and fathers have always known, is not self-evident and self-interpreting, and the Reformers did not mean that at all when they escaped the church’s magisterium.  Rather, the Bible requires and insists upon human interpretation that is inescapably subjective, necessarily provisional, and, as you are living witnesses, inevitably disputatious.

I propose as an interpretive rule that all of our subjective, provisional, disputatious interpretation be taken, at most, with quite tentative authority, in order that we may (1) make our best, most insistent claims, but then, with some regularity, we may (2) relinquish our pet interpretations and, together with our partners in dispute, fall back in joy into the inherent apostolic claims that outdistance all our too familiar and too partisan interpretations.  We may learn from the rabbis the marvelous rhythm of deep interpretive dispute and profound common yielding in joy and affectionate well-being.  The sometimes characteristic and demonic mode of Reformed interpretation is not tentativeness and relinquishment but tentativenss that is readily hardened into absoluteness, whether of the right or of the left, of exclusive or of inclusive, a sleight-of-hand act of substituting our interpretive preference for the inherency of apostolic claims. (13-14)

Brueggemann, Walter.  “Biblical Authority: A Personal Reflection.”  Struggling with Scripture.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.  5-31.