I debate for many reasons. We must discipline ourselves to debate, for on cc it must not be personal but it must be only what God wants us to know. When we express what this is in our own words, and when we listen to others express this and compare it to scripture, there is so much to learn. It even makes learning clearer to us when we are shown we are mistaken and when we reason through scripture at the mistakes we see in others.
I also see a growing understanding of eternal principles that God has shown us in the OT that most of the church (people who know Christ) have missed. NT has explained we don't have to become Jews to know God, that truth has been made such an extreme truth that the church has resisted knowing how and why God used the Jews for His kingdom. In our time, God has allowed archeology to give us knowledge of the way God used the Jews, and bridged the gap that time made in our understanding of the people God used. This is sifting down to us, first a few scholars that studied their culture, then those scholars going off to teach ancient history in our theological colleges, and finally reaching us. I love to tell about it. God had our plan of salvation worked out from the time Adam ate the apple, to follow how that developed is like knowing how the world operates.