Who's in charge here?

Pastors and theologians sometimes get fired up talking about theories of Biblical authority. The short version of what they write books and books about could go something like this:
The conservative (or "traditional") argument is that the Bible is entirely true, reliable, and free from error. Taken literally, it is the only appropriate guide for life and faith. It's commands are absolute and need to be obeyed everywhere and at all times.
The liberal ("or postmodern") argument is that the Bible was written by human authors who may have made mistakes and certainly reflected the biases and misconceptions of their culture. It can't be taken as any kind of compulsory source of obligation, but only as a questionable historical record that may or may not have anything important to tell us today.
The thing is, even though those may be caricatures of the views; most people who aren't pastors or theologians really don't understand or care about the whole issue. It doesn't touch our lives in ways we notice as life goes by.
Some people bemoan the loss of the Bible being seen as the authority for life. Usually they are the same people who worry about the loss of other kinds of traditional authority based on credentials, titles, experience, or whatever objective standard they were once able to rely on. They critique the way people "these days" don't trust anyone except their friends.
An honest consideration would reveal that authority has always been based more on relationship than on any objective value. It is only the modernist claim to objectivity that presumes that there is one absolute interpretation of the Bible and that these printed pages can or should control behaviour for us.
Take a few minutes to see the more than a dozen times in John 4-9 where Jesus appeals to his relationship with God the Father as grounds for his work and ministry. It was the relationship, not anything else that made him worthy of respect. He then went out of his way to prove himself repeatedly to his friends and followers.
So its true that there is less and less trust of anyone who makes claims to objective truth or authority "these days". But what if that isn't really any different than it always has been? What if supposed objective authority was really based on trusting certain views and systems because they had worked for people we found reliable?
I may be a heretic but it seems to me that we've always based our confidence on relationships; so its a good thing that we can have a relationship with God to help sort out all these authority issues among all the different interpretations competing for our obedience.