The problem of interpretation

I have been struggling with the bible for as far back as I can remember. I have never been comfortable with it. In part, I think it is because I was never taught to read it in a way that I can respect. Instead, school and church took a more "obey it. it is law" kind of approach, where I was simply expected to believe and not question. That demands a certain amount of faith that I have never had. Church perhaps had its reasons to do so (it is a church after all, made up of people who share the same core beliefs), and it has a necessary presupposition of biblical authority without which would be impossible to advance any sort of teaching. But I do place  more blame on my christian school, which gave extreme priority to a right wing, non-intellectual, literalist approach to hermeneutics that seemed to fly in the face of any contemporary studies of philosophy, literary theory, or even biblical exegesis itself. Even as a teenager I couldn't help but have a hard time swallowing much of what they were trying to teach me.

As I grew up it became clear that a fundamentalist/literalist approach to scripture was not only ridiculous, it was itself unbiblical (just take the absurd flights of fancy that creationists are forced to take in order to justify this sort of behavior as an example). After all, much of the Bible was written not as literal instruction, but as poetry, allegory, etc. Of course, once you realize that the bible must be interpreted (though any literary theorist will tell you that even the most "literal" approach necessitates interpretation) then the threat of overwhelming subjectivity is nearly paralyzing.

Of course, I just made it worse by majoring and then getting a MA in literature. Not only that, but I have done so in the midst of the so-called post-modern age, the age of deconstruction. Derrida, Fish, Lacan, and the rest of their ilk have called into question (though admittedly full of paradoxes themselves) the availability, knowability and expressibility of knowledge through words (and therefore, at all). Everything seems like a power play of subjectivity. While this provides delicious and infinite approaches to a literary work, it is completely disconcerting when it comes to a text that is supposed to contain Truth.
Now some people may say that the Bible is different (and as a christian I should certainly hope so) because it is the living word of God and because the Holy Sprit empowers us in its readings. While this sounds great in theory, in historical practice we can see a church filled with schisms and heresy, all stemming from interpretative differences. Even if we accept that the Bible has authority we still run into the hermeneutical problem of how to access it.

Even NT Wright (a theologian whom I enjoy very much, but who isn't able to give a much better reason than the one I was given in my youth: postmodern interpretation is wrong just because) admits the problem: "... a tension developing between authority and interpretation: How far can a reinterpretation of the text go before it ceases to carry the authority which was the point of interpreting it in the first place?" His solution leans on tradition of interpretation and context. I can partially get on board with this, for New Historicism is also a product of the post-modern critical era and it has quite a bit in common with what he advocates.

I know this post is poorly structured and probably incoherent, and therefore meaningless to most of you (especially the critical theory jargon bits), but I am open to comments, disagreements, and reading suggestions.