The Christian Life: Habitus, Habits, and Habitat

Over the past few months, I’ve been giving special attention to the notion of Christian formation, especially connected to habit formation and regular Christian practices. I’ve had this interest for some time, beginning with my reading of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit when I was in college.[1] I’ve renewed my interest as the idea of spiritual formation has gained popularity in evangelical Christianity with the works of Dallas Willard, James K. A. Smith, and others, popularized especially by John Mark Comer.[2]

But the notion of spiritual formation is not something new. The Bible, and especially the New Testament letters, emphasize spiritual formation: refusal to be conformed to the world’s pattern of thinking and a submission of the self to the pattern of Christ.

As a church, we’ve been studying Paul’s letter to the church at Rome and, after working through the infamously difficult chapters 9-11, Paul launches into texts that have a close connection to the notion of spiritual formation.

In Romans 12:1-2, Paul instructs Christians to offer their whole selves to God. This offering of the whole self denies material-spiritual or sacred-secular distinctions and instead requires a “constantly repeated offering of ourselves in all our concrete living.”[3] It requires a refusal to be conformed to or shaped by the values and thought patterns of the worldly system and instead requires transformation and renewal. In other words, Paul exhorts his readers to a Christian habitus.

What is a habitus? A habitus is “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks.[4] More basically, a habitus “is the set of cultural dispositions that has been acquired for being able to navigate competently” within a given place.[5]

The idea of a distinctly Christian habitus has been widely circulated, but is concisely articulated as “a set of disposition, values, and practices that reflect the gift of Christ.”[6] This set of disposition, values, and practices that reflect the gift of Christ are resurrectional and cruciform—they involve taking on the cross shaped life of Christ that eventuates in resurrection. A Christian habitus is a new way of life. It is the actualization of the new self being transformed, recreated, into the image of Christ.

Many Christians wrongly empty the notion of a Christian habitus with a somewhat bare description of the Christian life as a worldview—a way of perceiving the world that generally conveys an emphasis on intellectual activity. This terminology is not entirely unhelpful, but inasmuch as it locates the Christian life only as a set of intellectual propositions requiring assent, it fails to measure up to the fullness of the Christian life. Others have used terminologies such as a social imaginary in an attempt to include the whole of a person rather than just their intellectual faculties.[7]

Whatever terminology is used, Paul wants his readers to cultivate a habitus—a set of dispositions, values, and practices that are calibrated by the gospel of Jesus Christ. This habitus includes patterns of thought, the direction and ordering of desires, and formative and reactive actions. In other words, it is a re-creation of the self that is no longer marked by the world, the flesh, and the devil. This newly created self is not a result of finding one’s self, but of one’s self being found by God and transformed into the redeemed self.

How is a habitus formed? A Christian habitus is formed through three basic influences.

First, and foundational, the formation of a Christian habitus is impossible apart from the resurrecting power of the Holy Spirit, gifted to those who respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ with the obedience of faith. Apart from the gifting of righteousness in the Holy Spirit, becoming a righteous person is impossible. Apart from being given a new nature, in which the Holy Spirit inhabits the heart, a Christlike habituation is inconceivable. A new habitus cannot simply be cultivated. It must be created through the Holy Spirit. In this way, the Christian is transformed from the inside out as the Holy Spirit does his transforming work.

But the Christian gospel does not encourage passivity. Rather, it encourages participation.[8] For this reason, the Christian must participate in the new creation work of the Holy Spirit that inhabits the heart by cultivating habits of mind and of body. These habits are most forcefully connected to the practices of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, through which we participate in Christ’s death and resurrection and, indeed, with Christ himself (Rom 6:1-14; 1 Cor 10:14-22). Yet, these sacraments commission us to take up habits of the mind (a renewed way of thinking) and habits of life (a renewed way of living).

Habits of mind are necessary because patterns of thought that were previously calibrated to the world system must be re-calibrated according to the kingdom’s system. Immigrants from the world into the kingdom of God must learn to be good citizens of the kingdom, and this learning requires intellectual instruction of the sort that is typically associated with worldview formation.

But habits of mind are insufficient. They are insufficient because humans are not brains on a stick. Rather, humans are intellectual, psychological, social, emotional, spiritual, and (though often neglected) embodied. We should probably avoid making divisions of the human person too stark, but neither should we ignore aspects of the human person, including the reality that humans are embodied creatures. For this reason, habits of the mind must be supplemented by habits of life.

Cognitive sciences—and down-to-earth experience—indicate that many of our decisions, actions, and patterns of life have very little to do with our conscious intellectual activity. Instead, we are formed from the outside in whether we are aware of it or not. Too much research has been done to be neatly summarized here, but our habits have a way of shaping us. In other words, our habits function as a primary influence on our habitus. Those things that we do habitually (whether consciously or unconsciously) form our dispositions, values, and practices. For that reason, we must consciously incorporate the kinds of habits that will cultivate a distinctly Christian habitus.[9]

What is required, then, is a holistic approach to Christian discipleship that takes seriously each aspect of our personhood as relevant to the formation of our internal habitus. Our biology (including our genetics, sleep, nutrition, etc.), our emotional and psychological health, our intellectual development, our traditionally-described spiritual health, and our social environment all need consideration.

How is a habitus sustained? Although the notion that we are products of our environment has been overplayed, especially when used to lessen culpability for our behavior, it is true that our environment (where we spend our time, who we spend our time with, etc.) has massive influence on our habits and, therefore, on our habitus.

The embodied nature of habit transformation and the development of Christian habitus naturally takes place in a community of bodies. Within the habitat of the local church, “routine communal behavior that embodies this altered cognition” reinforces and sustains the Christian habitus. For that reason, Christians must attend not only to the formation of habits, but also to their habitat. It is in a Christian habitat, the local church, that the necessary habits are developed and the Christian habitus is maintained.

It is popular for Christians, especially in Western evangelicalism, to believe that Christian identity is fundamentally a matter of praying a prayer of salvation and giving assent to certain theological propositions. As discussed above, this bare-bones Christianity is insufficient for cultivating a Christian habitus. What is more, this approach to Christianity separates the Christian habits and desired habitus from a distinctly Christian habitat—the local church.

It is certainly possible to cultivate substitute Christian habitats—friend groups, personal Bible studies, online forums, etc. But the problem with these substitute habitats is that they are something akin to creating an ecosystem at a zoo. It can replicate the natural environment of the animals housed at the zoo, but it will always be constraining and artificial.

When the God-given Christian habitat of the local church is replaced by individual Christianity, friend groups, or Bible studies, certain practices erode (especially the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper) and the habitat becomes necessarily artificial as it becomes disconnected from the kind of concerns and aims of the local churches identified in the New Testament. Requirements to welcome People Like Me (PLMs) and People Not Like Me (NLMs) in the same fellowship of believers (see Romans 14-15), the mission to grow the group rather than to retain an insulated friendship, and the notion of ecclesial authority and accountability all deteriorate. There are other limitations to a Christian habit/habitus separated from the habitat of the local assembly, but these few are reason enough to question the viability of Christianity divorced from the habitat of the church.

But there is one final reason to emphasize locating the development of a habitus and the formation of habits in the habitat of the church. The church is the sphere in which God’s mercies are particularized. The driving motivation for creating a Christian habitus—becoming the kind of person who gives of the self to God and neighbor as a living sacrifice—is the mercy of God.[10]

When self-actualization, desire for acceptance or popularity, fear of God’s judgment, or other motivating factors drive the adoption of habits in pursuit of a particular habitus, that habitus will always be less than Christian. And when the habitat in which formation happens is segmented out from the church, the locus of God’s mercy, the habitus is unsustainable. It is only within this habitat of mercy, the local church, that the necessary conditions for developing a truly Christian habitus are found.  

Conclusion

The biblical authors are deeply concerned about the formation of Christians. As C. S. Lewis famously points out in Mere Christianity, God is not concerned so much about making people who do certain things, but about making a certain kind of people.[11] Yet, the two are not entirely separable. To cultivate a Christian habitus (manner of life), habits must be consciously formed and integrated into life. Because Christian formation requires the giving of the whole self to God, every sphere of life requires this habituation. At the same time, the local church is the habitat for Christian habituation—it is the ecosystem in which the kingdom of God in embodied. To cultivate the habitus required as a logical and reasonable response to God’s mercy, we must carefully consider our habits and we must root ourselves within the ecclesial habitat.

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[1] Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2014)

[2] Trevin Wax, “3 Waves That Have Shaped Evangelical Churches (and a 4^th on the Way),” The Gospel Coalition (June 4, 2024).

[3] C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans: A Shorter Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1985), 294.

[4] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 82-83.

[5] M. Alvesson, M and J Sandberg, “Habitat and Habitus: Boxed-in versus Box-Breaking Research,” Organization Studies 35, no. 7 (2014): 967-987.

[6] Michael J. Gorman, Romans: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2022), 242; for a fuller explanation see John M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), 504-508.

[7] See James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Hearers and Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples through Scripture and Doctrine (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 1-12.

[8] Michael J. Gorman, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 1-28.

[9] Duhigg, The Power of Habit; Drew Dyck, Your Future Self Will Thank You: Secrets to Self-Control from the Bible and Brain Science(Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2019); John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus; Become Like Him; Do as He Did (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook, 2024); Dru Johnson, Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2019).

[10] Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 508-516.

[11] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2022), 73.