This chapter does the job of stage-setting for the larger argument of the book. My intention is to present and critique various postliberal notions of background which involve the concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘church’. There will be no separate treatment of these, but they shall be treated as the two sides of the same coin, the idea that knowledge inhabits a textual world, in this case shaped by both church and tradition. In starting with a discussion of background, I