Scouting the other team means,
You need to know your own.
What do I mean? Watch our Truth in Two to find out (2 min vid + text below).
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Pictures: Josh Collingwood, Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT
“Scouting the other team” is imperative in sports. It is not enough for you to be excellent in athletics, you must understand what makes the opposing team excellent. Coaches assess the strengths and weaknesses of their opponent. Players spend hours watching videos of other competitors. Spending time in the “tape room” means that a player is committed to understanding his opponent’s approach to the game. Scouting is exactly what I do every week as a cultural apologist. I read and assess ideas from others. I have graduate degrees in Old Testament, social science research, and English. In every one of those degrees, it was imperative that I study theories about each subject. A theory is a man-made interpretive view of a subject. In each of my studies, I read theorists with whom I disagreed. I was assessing the strengths and weaknesses of opposing worldviews.
I see two extreme errors when it comes to Christian interpretation of other viewpoints. Sometimes I hear Christians say, “I don’t need to know what other people think. God’s Word is Truth and that’s all I need.” The problem here is discounting the revelation God has embedded in His world. Discoveries in medicine, sociology, literature, biology, and every field of human endeavor offers benefit for people. Psalm 111.2 makes clear that God’s works bring delight to those who study them.
And sometimes I see Christians go to the other extreme. When a certain theory – whether in the sciences or humanities – is proposed, some then interpret the Bible only through that lens. Cultural persuasion through economics or politics becomes the way of thought. Theories of evolution or universal basic income need careful, biblical analysis “bringing every thought captive,” as 2 Corinthians 10 says, to a wholistic Christian view. Sometimes scouting the other team shows weaknesses in the other team, and the need for improvement in our own. For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, president of the Comenius Institute, personally scouting out Truth wherever it’s found.