Pornography substitutes objectification for relationship—someone’s sexuality becomes a means to another’s arousal and pleasure rather than an aspect of selfhood that is mutually shared and fostered.  And as sexuality becomes a consumable this interaction objectifies both the purveyor and the consumer: porn ultimately debases both parties to “it” status.  By using other human beings, we become objects ourselves.

Q: So what is didacticism, and what has it got to do with Christianity (and pornography)?

A: It is an ideology that Christianity should embrace about as readily as it embraces pornography.

Describing something as didactic means that it is about teaching, or that teaching is its ulterior (or less visible) motive.  Further, calling a teaching method “didactic” can imply that the method is overly basic—more instructive than explanatory.

Didacticism, on the other hand, is an ideological position that essentially turns on the following assumptions:

a)      The learner may not be particularly competent and / or trustworthy;
b)      The material in question has very few right answers (or more typically, one right answer) and it is crucial to get that answer right.

Strange assumptions?  Well, some would insist that Christianity teaches that people are sinful and non-Christians won’t make wise choices about God, and also that making the wrong choice about God means going to hell.  So we need didacticism, right?

I disagree, and I think you should too.  Let’s look a little deeper.

Didacticism maintains that acquiring knowledge is not a matter of learning how to think (or even the result of thoughtful investigation) but of being directed to the right answer.  Didacticism puts no faith in the learner and instead relies solely on the instructor, valuing only the learner’s assent to the answer’s validity.

So on the one hand, didacticism is concerned solely with getting the right answer.  Yet on the other hand a didactic ideology functions to inculcate a certain self understanding and way of being: it ensures that people embrace certain beliefs so that they act and think in certain ways (and not others).

Didacticism = control of outcomes at the cost of respecting people and ideas.

In fact, didactic ideology can even be seen in teaching material written by Christians for Christians.  In such cases it seems that even spirit-filled Christians cannot be counted on competently to work through the Bible and understand God well.

But here again, by keeping the learner’s motives or (in)abilities “out of the way” the truth can be more easily presented and accepted, and its implications better lived out, right?  What’s the problem?

The problem is that instead of disdaining human motives or abilities the Bible, while being cautious and even critical of how people use them, urges readers to employ both in order to find out who God is!  Further, we are held responsible for our choices in this regard because God created us with the capacity to know God through these very abilities and motives!

Indeed, didactic ideologies view our journey to know God more like an unfortunate obstacle than a process crucial to the success of the very Christian formation that they seek to guarantee!  Moreover, they ignore the pivotal importance of the skills and virtues developed when, during this journey, we work through for ourselves:

i)                   what the questions are,
ii)                  why they matter,
iii)                 how we should go about considering them,
iv)                 what might represent possible answers,
v)                  why some answers might be better than others,
vi)                 and what we do once we’ve decided how we will best answer the question(s).

Didactic ideologies misunderstand what it is to be human because they disregard both the need for ownership of key decisions in one’s own life and for integration of one’s whole self therein.  Yet Didactic ideologies also misunderstand both Christianity and the Christian God, because they reduce Christianity to a formula to be memorized rather than entities (father, son, and spirit) to be known, loved, and engaged with in right relationship.

Like pornography, didacticism debases relationship and objectifies the parties involved (people, the Bible and, by extension, God).

And like pornography, didacticism has no place in Christianity.