I have been reading a lot about a term lately, that term is “habitus”. This word has quite a bit to do with my doctoral research that I’m getting into. The term has been used by the likes of Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Melanchthon, Luther, and most recently a French sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu. The term fluctuates a little in meaning over the thousands of years that it shows up in scholarship, but all of them come down to a similar idea: you don’t really know something until you have experienced it (and at that, experienced it over and over again).

Imagine two identical twin boys separated at birth. One is shipped off to a royal family in a European country, the other one is raised in a slum in a U.S. metropolis. The two boys have identical innate abilities because they are identical twins – they share the same DNA and have roughly the same IQ. You can even imagine that the two have the same interests and with scholarships given to the boy raised in the slums, the same ability to choose certain outcomes in their life. And yet, you can also imagine that these two boys would probably live radically different lives and even perhaps develop radically different personalities. The difference? The things they did over and over again, their habitus.

Lutherans have had a checkered history with this idea. On the one hand, the evidence seems to simply point out the observable truth that the more you experience something, the more it makes sense to you and shapes you to be the person that you are. By this logic, a baseball fan is at least partially a baseball fan because they watch baseball. A baseball fan who only watched ballet would maybe not be a great baseball fan in the end. On the other hand, Lutherans are and always have been a little concerned about too much of an emphasis on “experience” because that can end up in leaving Scripture behind or in works righteousness or even a little of both. That’s a fair concern.

As Christians, we’re stuck in this interesting space. We know that our Christianity has not come to us because of anything we have done. Luther puts this in the explanation to the 3rd Article of the Creed: “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel…” But then we are told in the commandments that we have a “habitus” of Sabbath keeping that is important: “We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.”

This is a little peek into what I’m wrestling with as I engage in this “habitus” of this degree that I’m pursuing with the help of University Lutheran. It’s interesting and a little confounding, but I’m extremely grateful for the ability to be able to engage in it. My hope is that all of this habitus moves from the theoretical to the practical and helps us to develop a “Lutheran habitus” that recognizes that grace is a gift of God, but it is a gift that we experience over and over again – and that makes for a habitus of grace that makes us different persons than what we would be without God’s grace. So this week, consider what you do over and over again. How is that creating a habitus (either a good one or bad one) in you, and how could a habitus of recognizing God’s grace make you a person who is a more distinct disciple of His grace?