Dan, thanks for your astute comments.

At the moment I tend to view this demodernization of Scripture as
only an imaginative exercise - a means of correcting other modes of
reading, and the distortions they have introduced into popular
Christian discourse, rather than replacing them. I also think the
object of the
exercise is to understand better - to contextualize but not
necessarily to relativize the authority of Scripture as the Word of
God. This is crucial. There is no point going to the stake over a misunderstanding of Scripture.

‘Seeing through the mystique’ of some cultural artefact is a very
postmodern thing to do! The fact that we find it so easy to frame the
problem in such terms is already highly revealing. I think we probably
do need to go through this
process in order to recover a new authority and power, though it would
be a mistake to prejudge how that ‘clout’ might appear. The
alternative is simply to reassert a discredited hermeneutic that has
nothing useful to say to a postmodern mentality. That would be far more perilous in my view.

We may have to suffer the shock and embarrassment of realizing that the emperor is naked - but it doesn’t alter the fact that he is still the emperor. In this case, it is the church that has dressed the poor man up in all his supposed theological finery…. The analogy doesn’t really work, but you see what I mean.

Instead, we would need a set of guidelines about how to approach
the formation of your own personal theology. A meta-theology if you
 will.

That is a very interesting proposition! I suspect that it will be
better simply to maintain an open conversation around a story, but I do think that a confident historical-critical methodology ought to be a significant voice in that conversation. Perhaps that’s a better way of approaching at the question of ‘authority’: who do we draw into that
conversation? Part of the problem in the past has been the breakdown of communication and trust between scholars and church leaders, clergy and laity, etc. So maybe the key to a valid hermeneutic for the emerging church is not to be found in some theory of authority but in genuine dialogue between all parties with a vested interested in how Scripture is perceived and used. It would certainly be a mistake to give people the impression that they are in a position to form their own personal theology, no matter how reliable the guidelines might be.