We turn now to the topic of the Bible as scripture. This topic draws attention to the wider matter of encounters that occur between a person's textual location and other texts or the texts of others. We shall treat the role and standing of the Bible as scripture, then, in the context of a more general understanding of encountering other texts.

I have argued that every person and group has a location in the textual situation and that this location grants them, among other things, an identity, a world, and directives concerning relations to and within it. This makes persons and groups, however elusive or complicated they may be, locatable on the textual field by virtue of the actual or potential texts of their identities and worlds. The textual locations of some people can be easily recognized. We at times refer to people as “living by the book.” At the other extreme are nonconformists who resist being identified or, as they might say, “pinned down.” While some people are more susceptible to change than are others, it can be said that textual locations can and do change. They do so by dynamics of confirmation and challenge.

Changes in textual locations occur primarily in two ways. One, as we saw earlier, is by means of an encounter with something that, because a person is textually unprepared, is not yet or resists textualization. Something unexpected and unaccountable challenges the person's textual location. These moments indicate a more general condition, namely, that we are not contained within or confined to our textual locations; we also live in present time even though for the most part our temporality is an uninterrupted flow of our futures into our pasts. Striking and more casual encounters with something non-textual is a part of living, and they effect changes in one's textual location. A second way by which changes occur is by encountering other texts or the texts of others. While most changes of this kind occur gradually, especially by means of maturation and education, it can be said that encounters with another text or with the text of another can also be sudden and unexpected.

Being affected in one's textual situation because of an encounter with another text is basic to the turn we now take toward religious texts.