Here is John Webster on the authority of scripture, and the moral requirement it involves as we engage it as God’s Word to us:

First, as divine speech and address, the text has authority. Though its genres are widely divergent (and though genre itself is not only a matter of textual form but also of readingstance), the Bible as a whole is address, the viva vox Dei which accosts us and requires attention. God’s address is interceptive; it does not leave the hearer in neutrality, or merely invite us to adopt a position vis-a-vis itself and entertain it as a possibility. It allows no safe havens; it judges. It is an ‘elemental interruption of the continuity of the world’.63 Christian theological doctrine about the authority of the Bible, and about the Bible’s status as ‘Holy Scripture’ has its roots here, in the bouleversement which God’s Word effects. Such doctrine is, crucially, not to be understood abstractly or formally, independent of the events of divine speech and the hearing which it evokes. The ‘authority’ of the Bible is not some textual quality per se, somehow inherent in this collection of pieces of inscribed discourse. Nor is it something which can be grasped as a purely formal relation between text and reader, or between text and teaching (as the quasi-legal language in which it is phrased can sometimes suggest). The authority of the Bible is real and functional; to speak of this authority is to articulate the relation between God as Word and the actions and dispositions of the church as the text is read. The text’s authority, its ‘holiness’ as ‘scripture’, is grounded in the fact that the text mediates divine speech in such a way as to command and establish reverence. [bouleversement=”upheaval”] [John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 332-33]

This is good!