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This, then, which gives to the objects of knowledge their truth and to him who knows them his power of knowing, is the Form or essential nature of Goodness. It is the cause of knowledge and truth.Footnote 1
In contemporary writing on theological education, the concept of ‘habitus’ is increasingly emphasised. As the recent volume Educating Clergy (published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2006) suggests, ‘we become what we habitually do’, and therefore, ‘learning by doing forms a person's dispositions’. In the view of the authors of this book, the proper focus for teaching theology is not communicating normative knowledge, nor developing particular skills; rather, the key issue is the instilling of habits, and attention to ‘engagement as a condition of knowing’.Footnote 2 In an intriguing manner, this emphasis echoes the classical question of the relationship between knowledge and the good life, and suggests that the two are inseparably intertwined. Theology, in other words, can only be taught by forming the student into the lifestyle it calls forth.
The stress on disposition and intuitive knowledge in theological education is consistent with some current trends in Anglo-American academic theology. It appears in the work of theologians as diverse as Ellen Charry, Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank, and is implied in contemporary theology's concern with the importance of community, as well as contextual practice.Footnote 3 The ‘turn to practice’ effectively assembles a number of significant issues under one roof: an appreciation for the embodied nature of human existence, attention to the significance of social context for shaping the subject's perspective and ‘character’, and the pedagogical challenge of dealing with different learning styles among students.
Combining all of these concerns under the concept of ‘habitus’ involves a number of significant limitations and weaknesses, however, which are often left unexplored in the literature of theological education. Over-emphasising the function of practice and habits grants insufficient critical attention to the limitations and blind spots that are part of local practice. Furthermore, it might be asked whether the concept of habitus offers sufficient resources to enable theology and communities to negotiate between communities of difference. If it is practice, not belief, which is to ground theology, then what does one do when practices collide? Finally, there are doctrinal concerns to raise about this trend – particularly with the role and function of the Holy Spirit to shape the individual subject in relation to its justification and sanctification. This paper explores the limitations and concerns regarding the adoption of the concept habitus in theological education, particularly as it is developed in Educating Clergy. The concern raised about this emphasis on habits and dispositions can be presented in its bluntest form in the question: can a student of theology be an ‘evil genius’?
The concept habitus
The concept of ‘habitus’ is perhaps best known as it is developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, from whose work the authors of Educating Clergy draw both explicitly and implicitly. Bourdieu uses the term to explore how subjective dispositions and perceptions are acquired in response to those objective social conditions which shape thought and action. The concept habitus represents an attempt to bridge the tension between individual decision-making and the determinative power of social structure; it seeks to name a dialectical relationship between ‘positions and dispositions’.Footnote 4 Bourdieu suggests that the body is a site upon which the norms of culture are encoded through the process of socialisation. The term habitus is employed to capture this formation of dispositions, thoughts, feelings, attitudes and habits, serving to incorporate a spectrum of factors that includes both thought and emotion, conscious and unconscious motivations. In his theory of practice, habitus is said to lie behind individual choice and rational calculation: ‘We can always say that individuals make choices, as long as we do not forget that they do not choose the principles of these choices’.Footnote 5
The theological turn to habitus
The contemporary concern with practice in theological education is by no means a new development. Latin American Liberation Theology brought the Marxian concept of praxis into the forefront of Western theological method in the 1960s.Footnote 6 In the 1980s, Edward Farley's influential Theologia called for a reform of theological education aimed at challenging the lost unity between knowledge and discipline as shared aspects of the nature of theology. Farley was concerned that theology's acceptance of objective scientific method as the locus of knowledge had reduced theological education to elaborating techniques of ministry, resulting in a ‘clericalization of practice’.Footnote 7 As an antidote, he proposed mending the rift between knowledge and disposition by emphasising that the former is grounded in habit. Farley argued that knowledge be understood as an ‘orientation of the soul’ (p. 35).
This trend in theological education and practical theology has only become stronger in recent years. Ellen Charry has called for a return to what she calls ‘sapience’ – which ‘includes correct information about God but emphasises attachment to that knowledge’.Footnote 8 In a similar vein, Stanley Hauerwas challenges the norms of modern liberal education, asserting that, ‘Christian discourse is not a set of beliefs aimed at making our lives more coherent, rather, it is a constitutive set of skills that requires the transformation of the self to rightly see the world’.Footnote 9 Both of these authors, like Farley, charge that the division between belief and practice is a symptom of modernity, one which has relegated theology to the private sphere, resulting in an over-emphasis on the individual subject at the expense of attention to community, as well as a blindness to the formative power of culture and embodied existence.
The recent study published by the Carnegie Institute in the USA, Educating Clergy, presents assumptions similar to these. It argues that, ‘we become what we habitually do. Learning by doing therefore forms a person's dispositions.’Footnote 10 The volume's authors contrast the task of training clergy with what they call ‘normative knowledge’. This latter approach ‘disengages the thinker from the everyday contexts of meaning in order to take up the position of a distanced, sceptical observer’ (p. 9). By contrast, ‘practical knowledge . . . requires engagement as a condition of knowing’. Therefore, the authors conclude, ‘seminary educators seek to form dispositions and the intuitive knowledge, or habitus, of a given religious or intellectual tradition in students’ (p. 23). Drawing from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, the idea of practice as a ‘certain kind of life’ is emphasised, in which identity, habits, and dispositions are formed that will guide the future identity and behaviour of the student. The primary task of theological education, then, is said to have formation as its ‘signature pedagogy’ (p. 33).
This emphasis on ‘habitus’ and practice in Educating Clergy represents an important pedagogical challenge for theologians to consider. The concept serves to highlight the significant task that is integral to theological education; namely, helping students wrestle with the difficulties of making the transition from theory to practice by developing a capacity to make mature and informed judgements. The authors of Educating Clergy suggest that such attention to the forming of habits and dispositions in the training of clerics is unique to theological education, and that training programmes of other professions might learn a great deal from examining the work of seminaries (p. 8). They argue that, in theological education, a concern for vocational identity – as opposed to a focus on acquiring technical skills – ‘is especially prominent’. Rather than developing a toolbox of techniques, students are apprenticed into a vocational identity, for ‘clergy are caregivers and guides to meaning – working like jurists, to discern the ethical import of their traditions’. The pastor cannot be a ‘value-neutral’ problem solver, for clerical ministry is a profession that involves an almost endless list of possible tasks and demands, so that training not only should not, but cannot, touch on all possible useful skills. Rather, what is deemed central to the task of theological education is forming habits and dispositions that foster a ‘pastoral imagination’ and identity (p. 10).
To explain what they mean, the authors point to a discussion among Jewish educators:
Rabbinical students at JTS [Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC] spend most of their five or six years of study pretty much the way many centuries of past rabbis have: immersed in learning Talmud, the legal codes, the Bible and its many commentaries . . . [etc.]. Most then go out and become congregational leaders all over the country. Within a year or two, I begin hearing back from them. They complain that we didn't really teach them what they needed for their work. What they really needed was an MBA, a master's degree in counselling . . . [etc.]. Did we really need to spend so much time on Talmud? I try to explain that, had they not become ‘holy’ through study of the ‘holy vessels’ of the tradition, their congregants would not have considered them entitled to play those roles. (p. x)
Faced with all the diverse tasks that clergy can be called upon to perform – from leading rituals to consoling mourning families – Educating Clergy argues that theological education should emphasise that ‘the special role of a pastor is embodied in his or her very being’ (p. ix). And the way to accomplish this task of instilling a clear sense of vocational identity and ‘pastoral imagination’ in a student, is, the authors suggest, through a focus on formation of habits and dispositions. To further illustrate the theoretical assumptions of this vision, along with some of its practical implications, it is instructive to turn briefly to a scholar who articulates similar concerns and challenges to the ideals of modern rationality, and its understanding of the religious subject, but who approaches them from outside of Christian theology.
Talal Asad is an anthropologist who is concerned that the voices of religious adherents – particularly Muslims – are marginalised by liberal secularism. In Asad's view, the traditional split in liberal political theory between public and private spheres of existence ignores particularity and difference, as well as the formative role of embodied experience. Asad suggests that the body ‘is enmeshed in traditions of cultivation’.Footnote 11 He continues, ‘A taught body is one to which “belief” . . . is at best secondary’. In his view, the human subject is enmeshed in traditions of cultivation that shape identity. Practice, not cognitive belief, is then understood to be a key to the religious subject's self-understanding. Thus, what is required to maintain a religious identity is for the distinctive habitus – or ‘the predisposition of the body’ – found in a religious community to be nurtured, so the community is able to shape the lives of its members (p. 289).
Asad argues that it was not until the emergence of the modern period that a conceptual split distinguished between beliefs and practices, which in turn supported the division between the secular and the religious. This shift involved relocating religion in the moods and motivations of the individual believer, rather than in the practices and rituals that discipline and form the subject.Footnote 12 Religion, he claims, was privatised and removed from the public sphere, in order to allow for the consolidation of nation states that incorporated numerous religious traditions, while preventing the specific truth claims or moral codes of any specific tradition from limiting the state's power. What constitutes a private religious view or experience, he argues, is defined within a ‘heterogeneous landscape of power’ (p. 36). Thus, ‘from the beginning’, Asad continues, ‘the liberal public sphere excluded certain kinds of people: women, subjects without property, and members of religious minorities’ (p. 183).
He argues that religious identity can only be isolated in some privatised space if religious belief can be separated from religious practice. That some forms of discourse are relegated in a secular society to the private sphere implies that ‘the domain of free speech is always shaped by pre-established limits’ (p. 184). If religion has more to do with embodied practice, as opposed to cognitive belief, then merely allowing religious adherents a voice in the public sphere does little to challenge hegemonic social structures and norms. If marginalised religious groups are to be included, then it is not simply that their beliefs that must be given a hearing – but their practices must also be freed from the hegemony of the dominant structural practices.
It is interesting to note the structural similarity that Asad's argument shares with Farley's analysis of the issues confronting theological education. The latter's concern to recover a sense of theologia, which he describes as a disciplining of the habitus of the theological student, shares much with Asad's focus on embodied practices and the instilling of habits.Footnote 13 John Milbank, who draws directly from Asad's work, argues that, ‘a claim to know truly, a claim to know at all, as Plato argued, only makes sense within a framework of meathexis (participation)’.Footnote 14 In Theology and Social Theory, Milbank is careful to clarify that by this he does not mean that out in the ‘real world’ one will discover what is actual instead of merely theoretical (which is how he interprets the meaning of the concept of praxis), but rather that it is only through being formed by a certain vision and practice that one can be authentically shaped by a tradition. He writes, ‘There is no priority of praxis, but instead a single, seamless, theory/practice which has one privileged canonical moment.’Footnote 15 Here the concept of habitus is expressed as a ‘metanarrative realism’ – a ‘form’ or ‘way of life’ which will shape the subjectivity of those who participate in it.
From habitus to theology
There is much to appreciate in this emphasis on the formative power of habitus, and the correlative appreciation for the significance of practice and embodied experience in the learning process. And yet, there are also a number of puzzlingly vague – even contradictory – aspects to this current trend within theological education which require more sustained examination. Some of these issues are addressed briefly in what follows.
Which practices, whose habitus?
In an essay that echoes a number of points similar to those summarised above, Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass call for greater attention to ‘the possibility of a life shaped by a positive response to God’Footnote 16 To clarify, they add, ‘when we refer to Christian practices we have something normative and theological in mind’ (p. 21). This is all very well, but it raises the question: exactly which practices are being pointed to as normative? Dystra and Bass suggest an interesting list (including ‘hospitality’, ‘keeping Sabbath’, ‘testimony’ and ‘forgiveness’), but little mention is given as to why these practices in particular are being highlighted. The introductory section of Educating Clergy argues that theology ‘demands a stance different from that required by science. It requires engagement as well as critical distance. And in this stance, engagement leads.’Footnote 17 But when one asks the crucial question – ‘engagement with what?’ – the concreteness of this turn to practice is quickly lost. Which habitus are theological educators being called upon to model to their students? When we are asked to instil habits and dispositions in students, what specifically is being imagined? Different authors present different lists of central practices, and so, without greater clarity and agreement over what we are talking about, it is not yet clear that this emphasis on the discipline of habitus has the capacity to rejuvenate theological education by serving as a foundation for an integrated pastoral imagination and identity. Given the differing doctrinal understandings and ecclesial practices not only between Christian denominations, but increasingly within them, this call to re-emphasise a distinctive Christian habitus remains troublingly vague.Footnote 18
The ideology of communal boundaries
Related to this concern over the lack of specificity regarding which practices form the basis of the contemporary turn to habitus is the flip side of the problem: the possibility that the emphasis on communal habits and practices, as opposed to correct knowledge and belief, may encourage some educators, along with their students, to privilege their own subjective preferences and styles, all in the name of being true to the formative power of inherited habits. When the authors of Educating Clergy argue that ‘communal norms . . . establish boundaries for human knowing’, they also suggest that these same norms will provide resources for internal critique, and this is no doubt true to some extent.Footnote 19 But might this attitude, especially as phrased, risk encouraging an overly comfortable security with one's preferred local ‘boundaries for human knowing’? Are we to understand that critique of one's tradition ought not to occur from outside of the tradition? Support for this concern emerges when John Milbank employs the contemporary emphasis on concepts like habitus to suggest that ‘Christian theology must continue to subvert other discourses at the very point of their denial of otherness’, and that it is ‘better to replace dialogue [with other traditions] with mutual suspicion’.Footnote 20 The seemingly endless capacity of human beings – including those in the church – to delude themselves offers sufficient warrant to resist any thorough embrace of the notion that communal norms establish the boundaries of knowledge. A perspective that refuses to allow the external world to interrupt it is not only potentially dangerous; it is also deeply flawed theologically. A church that is capable of being interrupted by divine revelation cannot self-righteously fall back upon the limitations of communal norms.
The claim that local practices and habits constitute the boundaries of knowledge is further complicated when the question of social change is considered. For example, what can be made of intellectual breakthroughs such as those achieved by Copernicus or Galileo, whose radical and irregular intellectual conclusions contrasted dramatically with the habits and dispositions of their age? Although habitus is described as being subjectively embodied in individual agents, at the same time, it is described as an objective ‘way of life’ and collective social phenomenon. Without refining further how these two moments relate, the concept of habitus is unable to explain is what caused Galileo's ‘dispositions’ to change? When confronted with the issue of causality, the role of habitus often becomes tautological, as dispositions are defined in terms of their consequences. Does the Christian see the world a certain way because she has been formed by a particular way of living, or is it because a Christian sees the world a certain way that she adopts a particular form of life?Footnote 21
Once again it is instructive to examine Talal Asad's formulation of the formative role of practice to illuminate how the concept of habitus insufficiently resolves such questions. Asad states that, in the Middle East, religion is constructed much differently than in the West, due to its complex history and culture, but also because modern Islamic orthodoxy is more self-consciously rooted in practice and tradition. He is careful to clarify that this should not be understood to imply a rigid or unthinking form of discursive practice, but one that is contested and developed through ‘tradition-guided reasoning’.Footnote 22 The ‘virtuous Muslim’, he continues, ‘is thus seen not as an autonomous individual who assents to a set of universalizable maxims but as an individual inhabiting the moral space shared by all who are bound by God (the umma)’ (p. 219). It is noteworthy that an implication of this view is that those Muslims who are comfortable with the public/private distinction in their own self-identity would not be considered a ‘virtuous Muslim’ according to Asad's universalised schema. Secondly, this conceptualisation of subjectivity emphasises being bound to one primary tradition. The identity of the Muslim is to emerge from a shared Islamic ‘moral space’. Yet, is it accurate to describe individuals in pluralistic societies as inhabiting only one such collective space or ‘tradition’? Although Asad's analysis of Middle Eastern societies does contribute some helpful insights into the particularities of those cultures, at the same time, ‘Islam’ emerges as a primary unifying signifier, which serves as a stark contrast to the ‘West’.
A similar problem emerges in Christian theological education. If the instilling of a habitus based on certain practices and dispositions is exaggerated or overemphasised, the danger is that it could promote a certain level of sectarianism, even support a retreat from ecumenism, given the great diversity within and between the churches. Furthermore, whereas the authors of Educating Clergy are largely based in independent denominational theological schools and seminaries, what would it mean to seek to instil a specific habitus among theology students in a university classroom, where similar ecclesial backgrounds, or at least shared vocational trajectories, cannot be assumed?
The use of the term ‘religion’
Perhaps the authors of Educating Clergy might be puzzled by these last few concerns that have been raised. It is possible that one objection could be that I am taking the terms ‘practices’ and ‘habits’ too narrowly. What if those who emphasise habitus are concerned only to encourage a general attitude towards theological education – one which emphasises attention to process, but not any process in particular – so that they do not intend to suggest any universal norms for practice?
If this is indeed the case, then a new complication emerges, one that causes a serious problem with the concept of habitus as it is being used here. For if this emphasis on practice does not refer to any specific practices, but only practices in general, then the capacity of habits to shape identity and disposition becomes groundless. This problem emerges in Educating Clergy through the manner in which the concept of ‘religion’ is described. The reader is told that, ‘religious understanding is deeply and inescapably connected to identity and meaning’.Footnote 23 Religion is associated with ‘existential attunement’ and, following Paul Tillich's perspective, with ‘the human impulse toward some ultimate concern or meaning’ (p. 101). Formulated in these terms, the concept of ‘religion’ is implied to be a universe genus or essence that involves particular attitudes and questions. The emphasis here is less on specific practices or dispositions, and more so on the meaning behind the practices – their telos and intention. At this point, the assumptions about ‘religion’ in this volume are entirely contrary to those defended by Talal Asad. For him, specific practices and contexts really do shape distinctive identities. Islamic religion is not about ‘meaning’ or ‘identity’, but about disciplining human bodies to engage the world in certain ways. Those who understand religion as a quest for meaning will likely be quite comfortable with a split between public and private life, whereas Asad himself completely rejects this distinction.
This being the case, perhaps practice is not as formative and central to the authors of Educating Clergy as they appear to suggest. It is notable that, throughout the book, examples of exemplary practices in theological education shift seamlessly between anecdotes from Christian and Jewish seminaries. Is it not revealing that, in a volume emphasising the centrality of habitus for forming distinctive religious identities, religions and denominations with very differing practices are treated as fulfilling and nurturing very similar pedagogical outcomes? A close reading of Educating Clergy suggests that a normative understanding of the nature of ‘religion’ is operative beneath its emphasis on habitus, so that it is not in fact a distinct way of life that is shaping the theological student, but some foundational presuppositions about the telos of the pedagogical process.
Knowledge and the good life
The emphasis on repairing the gap between belief and practice, knowledge and the good, public and private existence, which are all described as part of the achievement of habitus, aims to mend the troubling fragmentation in social and personal life that is so characteristic of modernity. It is noteworthy that a number of the scholars cited above refer frequently to the limitations of modern society, and betray a tendency to identify key moments when theology mistakenly surrendered itself to the foreign norms of the secular age. Obviously the troubled place of theology in modernity is a significant issue in theology, and the complexity of its relationship to theological education cannot fully be addressed here. But it is clear the concept of habitus cannot bear the weight increasingly delegated to it in theological education, when theologians expect the concept to resolve the dilemmas that modernity presents to theology. For the ‘bridge’ of habitus that is to span the gap between the subjective and objective, knowledge and experience, is often engulfed in fog. How one passes from one side of the division to the other is seldom clear, and so the theologian does not receive much in the way of concrete guidance from it to assist with a crossing of the stormy waters of contemporary theological education.
Rather than serving as a helpful way to bring together an appreciation of individual decision and context, the concept of habitus leads one to ask whether the challenge that it presents to the public/private sphere distinction does not amount to much more than yearning for a collective form of life free from inner and outer boundaries; or free from a tension between internal tradition and external society? To a certain extent, Asad's protest against the limits placed upon religious communities in a secular state echoes the protest that many citizens occasionally make against the limitations and failures of political representation. By resisting the de-essentialising of concrete differences that he argues is encouraged by liberal democracies, Asad risks essentialising the internal characteristics of the minority communities he champions. His position contains elements that suggest a dualistic ‘clash of civilizations’ attitude – faulting the foreign and flawed institutions of Western society for oppressing particularity, and validating the distinctiveness of Islamic communities. A similar problem emerges when one suggests that belief and practice, knowledge and the good life, can be brought back together in a ‘seamless’ manner (to quote Milbank) in our time and place.
There are also substantial theological grounds for questioning this trend in theological education; for example, what does it imply about the doctrines of justification and sanctification? The concept of habitus in Educating Clergy is largely given the task of mediating a religious tradition to the theological student. As the pedagogical process forms dispositions and instils habits, it effectively becomes, to employ classical theological terminology, the ‘means of grace’. It is not theological content that drives the formation of the student, but the manner of its delivery. Is there not, then, an element of what classical Reformed theology would call ‘works-righteousness’ hidden underneath the idea of habitus? Although the concept fits well with the pragmatist sensibilities found in a considerable amount of Anglo-American theology, it does so at the expense of making the object of theological education a product of the quality of the teaching process. Although learning is not subjected to a conception of ‘autonomous reason’, nor is it to the objective agency of the divine revelation. Both of these possibilities have been absorbed by practice, which effectively collapses the bridge between subjectivity and objectivity, leaving the educator (or her local community) as the sole ground of the learning process.
The classic attempt to unify knowledge and the good life appears, of course, in Plato's Republic, where it is the soul focused on the Good that ‘is the cause of knowledge and truth’ (to refer again to the quotation that began this essay). Whatever one makes of Plato's treatment of the issue, it is noteworthy for the purposes of this discussion that, in his analogy of the Sun – which serves to illustrate how the Good illuminates the faculties of knowledge – ‘the Sun is not vision, but is the cause of vision and also is seen by the vision it causes’.Footnote 24 The sense-organs discussed by Socrates are not the Good themselves, nor do they generate the Good; rather, Socrates urges his audience to open their senses to the Good and be illuminated by it. Translating this (albeit crudely) to the present discussion of habitus, our habits do not necessarily generate the Good, although they might possibly assist our being able to recognise it. This nuance is often lost in treatments of habitus, such as that found in Educating Clergy, when the process itself becomes the message.
In an essay that explores the relation between ecclesiology, hermeneutics and christology, Nicholas Healy offers an interesting aside that is relevant to this discussion. He recalls the controversy between the Dominicans and the Franciscans over the relationship between poverty and obedience, which can clearly be described as a dispute over the proper habitus to be embodied by Christian discipleship. The Franciscans insisted that poverty was the pre-eminent Christian virtue, but how poor one ought to appropriately be was a matter of much dispute. Healy notes that Thomas Aquinas resolved the question by privileging obedience to Christ over poverty; ‘thus poverty, although a vital element of the Christian life, is finally only an instrumental means by which the Christian seeks to follow Christ more truly’.Footnote 25 In this situation, although certain principles and practices must be followed, they are not exempted from criticism or reflection; nor are they ‘seamless’ ways of life that are immune from dispute. ‘Critical leverage’, suggests Healy, is dependent upon a doctrinal principal and commitment, which helps the disputing parties negotiate and adjudicate disagreements over practice and habits. It is attention to such matters of theological content that the emphasis on habitus lacks.
Though this historical example illustrates what is at stake in this debate, perhaps it is helpful at this point to frame the question even more concretely: is it not possible that a theological student can be an evil genius? Does it not fall within the frame of a Christian anthropology to be able to imagine a brilliant theologian, and graceful pastoral liturgist or counsellor, who is also vulnerable to the wages of sin? Can theological education not instil knowledge in a student without necessarily shaping how she will live? The question can be reframed by raising the opposite problem (which is perhaps even more difficult for the theological educator to observe): can a good and upright Christian be a bad academic student, or be deprived of the necessary skills required for professional ministry? There have been more than a few occasions on which I have encountered a theological student who I could confidently describe as embodying the Good, but whose cognitive capacities and knowledge restricted their ability to serve effectively as Christian leaders. It is not within the capacity of limited humanity to construct a habitus able to bridge knowledge and the Good without fail. Theological educators would hardly sleep at night if they believed that the very ‘dispositions’ and habits of their students depended entirely upon what occurs in the classroom (or worse: an enthusiastic embrace of this perspective might well have problematic narcissistic consequences). Furthermore, many teachers, I suspect, share my own relief at having discovered on occasion that it has been despite my own performance, not merely because of it, that theology has been experienced as living and illuminating in the classroom.
More positively, I would suggest that attention to habitus in theological education might be balanced by a description of the theological student as often resembling what Rowan Williams calls a ‘lost soul’.Footnote 26 A lost soul is one who longs for the seamless integration so greatly desired and sought after by theological students, and panics when the desired unity is not forthcoming. Such a creature often rages and laments when it experiences limitations and incompleteness. But, as Williams notes, ‘to be a conscious subject is to be involved in thinking through what it is to experience check or limit’ (p. 146). For him, it is through wrestling and negotiating with this dilemma that the subject achieves identity, although by no means a permanent or rigid one. I would suggest that the concept of habitus might be very useful for thinking about how to foster such a process in theological education, but only if it is theorised and imagined in more complex ways that is often presented. As critics of Bourdieu's social theory have often noted, homogeneity of habitus is often not forthcoming, and even shared habits are ‘epistemologically ambivalent’.Footnote 27 An approach to theological education that privileges ‘formation’, ‘integration’, and shared ‘dispositions’ not only risks failing to help students deal with complexity and incompleteness; it also will fail to serve the needs of churches and communities that are themselves conflicted over how best to live. Perhaps it is accurate to suggest that one task of theological education is to instil a particular habitus in students, but it can only be one that is informed by certain presuppositions and commitments, which will emerge through attention to the theological content that the ‘way of life’ intends to embody.
The concept of habitus in current writing on theological education does serve to illuminate the significance of practice, dispositions, modelling, and affect in the learning process; however, making it the primary trope through which to approach the discipline of theology threatens to impose a factory-metaphor on pedagogical process. Is it responsible (or, to use theological language, ‘faithful’) to describe teaching as a process that effectively manufactures dispositions? It is important to analyse more critically what unrealised assumptions lie behind the current interest in habitus, and to examine what structural issues in society and academy make it appear to us particularly attractive and compelling. As an analysis of Educating Clergy demonstrates, some guiding presuppositions about what constitutes ‘religion’ underwrite those practices and habits which are privileged in its presentation of theological education. Such a recognition serves to illustrate that habitus is a plastic concept, which cannot form or shape any specific virtues or habits in its own right. For this reason, reflection on the means and ends of theological education is an issue properly informed by the content of the Christian tradition itself, and as such, cannot avoid attending to the question of what norms and sources will be the ‘critical leverage’ with which to evaluate differing habits and dispositions.
