Tyler Wittman on the habitus of theology:
The habitus of theology is the God-given disposition or temperament for receiving, confessing, and living in accord with divine teaching. It includes several things: reverence for God and his will (cf. the ten commandments and the Lord’s prayer); teachableness before Holy Scripture; gratitude to God for the wisdom of the saints, especially when our own judgment becomes too idiosyncratic; and a sense that growth in understanding comes about more by prayer and repentance than by philosophical acumen because the end of theology is fellowship with God “who dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim 6:16).
This habitus is cultivated by the grace of the Holy Spirit as we hear the Word of God in the communion of saints, characterized by the baptismal pattern of dying to sin and living to God. It endears us to the intellectual practices and standards conducive to dogmatic theology: ones that appreciate mystery, resist vain curiosities, and that don’t treat theology as “just another subject like any other.”
When theologians without a well-developed habitus attempt to instruct the church, error usually results. After all, an ornithologist can tell you the ecological significance of sparrows and help you to see it when others can’t, because she is equipped with the right habitus. Like any disposition or skill, the theological habitus can be malformed or confused with the habitus of another subject.
Where this happens, we have a hard time perceiving mysteries and stewarding them well (1 Cor 4:1). Our eyes are unadjusted and we struggle to see divine teachings for what they are. We lose sight of their purpose, function, and significance in God’s dealings with us, and so we scatter them like pests. And the void they leave will always be filled with real problems, as the history of trinitarian theology’s decline throughout the 20th century attests.
