It’s rarely the Bible teachers who head to Rome. Rather, it’s the philosophers

You may be right about that, and I think I can see why. The Bible teacher seems to me to be more likely to read the Bible in a vacuum, whereas the philosophy teacher, while still fully conversant with the Bible, is also immersed in what other, older scholars have said about it. Any teacher who goes back more than five centuries in his study of commentaries and other thnking about Christianity is inevitably going to be dealing with Catholic thinkers.

At that point, he’s forced to evaluate their ideas, apart from the divide created by the Reformation. And a common thread seems to be that he recognizes Biblical Christianity in them, where he hadn’t expected to. He has to confront the context in which the Bible has been read by wiser men than himself, and, as Dr. Koons says, “to try to sort out which of the two traditions was more likely to be the fullest expression of the Gospel.”

A Bible teacher is less subject to this sort of thing, as he’s focused mainly on the documents themselves, and historical context is more of a sideline. I don’t mean to imply that a specialized Bible teacher is ignorant of historical context, but it’s not his specialty. By the same token, a philosophy professor who is an active Missouri Synod Lutheran is hardly going to be ignorant of the Bible, even if his knowledge of the technicalities of it are less than that of the Bible scholar. It seems to me that a Bible teacher would be less obligated to connfront the same questions head-on, and wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of Aquinas, Thomas a Kempis, or even Augustine of Hippo. They’re outside of his specialty, butnot outside that of a philosophy teacher.