Wisdom and Wonder: How Peter Kreeft Shaped the Next Generation of Catholics

By Brandon Vogt

Few figures have impacted the rising generation of Catholics more than Peter Kreeft, the widely respected philosophy professor and prolific bestselling author of over 80 books. Through his writings and lectures, Kreeft has shaped the minds and hearts of thousands of young apologists, evangelists, teachers, parents, and scholars. This collection of eighteen essays, mainly by millennial Catholic leaders and converts to the Catholic faith, celebrates Kreeft’s significant legacy and impact, his most important books, and the many ways he has imparted to others those two seminal gifts: wisdom and wonder.

Among the eighteen contributors to this book are Brandon Vogt, Trent Horn, Tyler Blanski, Dr. Douglas Beaumont, JonMarc Grodi, Jackie Angel, Matthew Warner, Rachel Bulman, Fr. Blake Britton, and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642291926

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Giver of Wisdom and Wonder

Brandon Vogt

I discovered Peter Kreeft in college. It was 2008, and I was a senior at Florida State University, studying mechanical engineering and physics. After a few years of religious ambivalence, my faith was reawakened by a Protestant campus ministry, and I was hungry for God. Like many math and science majors, however, I wasn’t satisfied with warm, fuzzy religious experiences. I wanted more than dim lights and emotive praise and worship music. I craved tight, rational arguments for my faith, especially since most of my engineering friends rejected belief in God as little more than blind superstition. I wanted a faith that made intellectual sense.

Around this time, I also became intrigued by Catholicism, which increased my difficulties. My atheist engineering friends offered strong reasons not to believe in God, and now, from the other direction, my Protestant friends offered strong reasons not to become Catholic. I was troubled.

That’s when someone handed me two books written by a philosophy professor from Boston College named Peter Kreeft (which I later learned is pronounced krayft, not kreft): his Handbook of Catholic Apologetics and Catholic Christianity. I started with the Handbook and was immediately stunned. The first page of the introduction promised what I longed for: a clear, rational summary of all the major arguments for all the major Christian teachings challenged by unbelievers—things such as God’s existence, the Resurrection of Jesus, miracles, heaven and hell, and the problem of evil. And it delivered: throughout the rest of the book, that’s exactly what it provided. It was sharp, witty, and extremely convincing.

I was a believer at the time, yet, like many young Christians, I faced lingering doubts. But I remember finishing the Handbook and thinking, My goodness, this is all true—all of it. Christianity is rational and logical. Any smart person can get behind this and defend it. The Handbook’s two coauthors, Kreeft and fellow Boston College professor Father Ronald Tacelli, made such crisp and forceful arguments—even articulating the best objections before swiftly dismantling them—that it put to rest the idea that Christianity is just mindless fantasy. Finishing that book gave me a surge of confidence that Christianity was true and could withstand even the strongest challenges from my smart engineering friends.

From there I turned to the other Kreeft book I received, Catholic Christianity, which helped address doubts flying from my Protestant friends. This book walked through the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), the official summary of Church teaching, offering helpful commentary on each passage. Before this, someone had recommended that I read the Catechism from beginning to end, but I had difficulty with that. I was like a new Christian trying to power through the Bible, straight through from Genesis to Revelation, yet barely making it past the first few books. I found the Catechism intimidating and dense, especially as a neophyte unfamiliar with the landscape of Catholic theology. But Kreeft’s commentary made it wonderfully accessible. He unpacked the core text with clarity, charm, and even humor, revealing the splendor and genius of the faith. In fact, after reading Kreeft’s book, I immediately went back and read the Catechism, which shimmered in dazzling new light.

This is the mark of a great teacher. The best teachers pull you toward the great primary texts, not away from them. They help you understand the original author and fall in love with his work. Kreeft has played matchmaker in this way for many students, authors, and books, introducing readers to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, the Bible, and the Catechism. The more you read Kreeft, the more you love those authors and texts and want to read them yourself. To borrow an analogy from Lewis, Kreeft is a beam of light shining on those great works, yet he doesn’t demand that you look primarily at his own writings—at the beam of light—but along that beam of light toward the other giants of philosophy and faith, whom Kreeft illuminates.

Teaching Me How to Think

Thanks in large part to Kreeft, a couple of weeks before graduating college in 2008, I converted to Catholicism. After finishing his two books, the Handbook of Catholic Apologetics and Catholic Christianity, I knew he would remain a significant touchstone for the rest of my life. For some reason, however, I was under the impression that he was a relatively obscure professor who had written just a couple of books. I was delighted to think I had discovered a little-known gem—he was my guy and mine alone. It was only after my conversion, while talking with a new Catholic friend and casually dropping Kreeft’s name, the way you’d drop an obscure band or book reference, that I realized I had dramatically underestimated Kreeft’s influence. My friend said, "Oh, yeah, I love Peter Kreeft. I’ve read so many of his books—he’s so good. I replied, Wait, what other books did he write? My friend answered, Are you serious? He has like fifty or sixty books, and they’re all incredible." When I got home, I googled Kreeft’s name and found out that, indeed, he had written scores of books and had produced dozens of audio lectures and videos, some viewed over a hundred thousand times. Kreeft was a huge deal. He was a major writer, and his output was voluminous, which meant I was just getting started.

I began gorging on Kreeft’s work. I read everything from his Socratic dialogues to his spiritual reflections. I swallowed up his books on Lewis, Tolkien, Aquinas, prolife apologetics, the Bible, prayer, and even parenting.

All of this began affecting me in noticeable ways. For example, as I read his work, I noticed my thinking becoming sharper. I became a more critical reader, more alert to arguments and fallacies. Surprisingly, I became more open to talking with people with whom I disagreed, sharing serious dialogue about controversial questions. Why this change? Because, I later realized, Kreeft was teaching me how to think and engage ideas, carefully and critically. He did this especially through his Socratic dialogue books.

Before reading Kreeft, I had no philosophical background. Sadly, like most STEM majors, I wasn’t required to take a single philosophy or logic class in high school or college. I could solve the most complex math and physics problems, yet I found it difficult to engage ideas with anything beyond feelings and intuition. Kreeft changed all that. He sharpened my thought and gave me the intellectual tools needed to engage the world critically. The gift of literacy is invaluable—ask Frederick Douglass—but the gift of critical thinking is perhaps even more precious, and Kreeft gave that to me. He taught me how to think.

But more than teaching me how to think—and this really sets him apart from other teachers—he offered me wisdom. Kreeft isn’t just smart, and he doesn’t just convey information. His intelligence is elevated by virtue, which yields wisdom. His writings bear the same aroma as Socrates’, Augustine’s, and Aquinas’, and even the words of Gandalf and Dumbledore. These sages stand above mere genius, not only because what they say is right and true but because they are wise and good. And so is Kreeft. He’s a bearer of wisdom.

Kreeft the Convert Maker

From there, I began promoting Kreeft wherever I could. I recommended his books and dropped his name often with friends. But when I did, I was surprised to learn how many of them—especially fellow converts—had already come under his influence. Almost all of them explained how Kreeft had led them to the Church or influenced their conversion.

I don’t have hard data on this, but from the perspective of someone connected to hundreds of Catholic converts, I think it’s hard to find another figure in American Catholicism who has influenced more conversions to the Church over the last three decades than Peter Kreeft. If he’s not this generation’s premier Catholic convert maker, he’s certainly among the top two or three. Throughout the 1990s, the Church welcomed a significant wave of converts from Protestantism, influenced by apologists such as Scott Hahn, Patrick Madrid, and Karl Keating, who aimed to show Protestants the biblical basis for the Catholic faith. Then, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there was another wave of converts, coming from more secular backgrounds, influenced by thinkers such as Bishop Robert Barron, Father Robert Spitzer, and Dr. Edward Feser. Often raised in nonreligious homes, these second-wave converts weren’t immediately swayed by biblical apologetics (since they didn’t believe in the Bible) but were convinced by strong arguments for God, meaning, and objective morality.

But the one overlapping influence in both waves, it seems to me, was Peter Kreeft. Converts from the 1990s often reminisce, I read Hahn and Kreeft and then decided to become Catholic. More recent converts, from the 2000s and 2010s, will often explain, I watched Bishop Barron videos, then read some Peter Kreeft books, and finally entered the Church.

Of course, even more people mention Kreeft as the solitary or main figure who drew them to the Church. Yet Kreeft seems to be the one figure sitting atop both conversion waves over the last thirty years, both the Protestant-to-Catholic wave and the secularist-to-Catholic wave, mainly because he offers help and resources to all types of converts: to Protestants he offers a clear defense of Catholicism; to atheists, strong reasons to believe in God; and to agnostics, encouragement to hop down from the fence of indecision and try Pascal’s famous wager (Kreeft is more responsible than anyone for the revival of interest in Pascal’s apologetics).

Kreeft’s witty and whimsical prose has led many people to describe him as the next Chesterton. I agree with them. There’s no living writer whose style or content is more similar to Chesterton’s (though Kreeft’s clarity and defense of mere Christianity has also earned him a well-deserved claim to be the next C. S. Lewis).

But Kreeft is like Chesterton in another, more important way. Chesterton was the great convert maker of the twentieth century: many people came into the Church through his direct influence, and his indirect influence produced even more conversions. For example, Chesterton’s book The Everlasting Man helped C. S. Lewis to believe in God, and Chesterton shaped Fulton Sheen’s writing and thinking more than any other figure. So think of the millions of people evangelized by Lewis and Sheen, and then trace those conversions, in part, back to Chesterton. For every person who counts Lewis or Sheen as their father in faith, their spiritual grandfather is Chesterton.

The same holds in this century for Kreeft. He’s the force behind more than one wave of conversions (with more to come in the future, I’m sure). After teaching and writing for more than sixty years, he has shaped multiple generations of converts who themselves are drawing others to Christ and the Church (many of those converts are featured in this book). Kreeft is a spiritual father to hundreds of converts, a spiritual grandfather to thousands, and will soon become a spiritual great-grandfather to many more.

Five Lessons from Kreeft

But to return to Kreeft’s personal influence: How else has this great man shaped me, besides bolstering my faith, teaching me to think, and contributing to my conversion? Since reading those first two books, the Handbook and Catholic Christianity, I’ve devoured most of Kreeft’s other eighty-plus titles, and I’ve listened to all of his audio lectures multiple times, constantly cycling through them. I could share dozens of ways he has shaped my mind and soul, but five lessons stand out.

First, philosophy begins in wonder. This was Socrates’ motto, and Kreeft embodies it better than anyone I know—which is, unsurprisingly, why many people also dub Kreeft a modern Socrates. (Comparisons to Chesterton, Lewis, and Socrates? Can you do much better than that? Yet the comparisons are warranted.)

Kreeft exudes wonder. It’s contagious. You’re drawn to it whenever you read or listen to him. From books such as Jesus-Shock, in which he revives the startling power of Jesus, to The Philosophy of Tolkien, in which, through the strange beauty of Middle-earth, he breathes life into timeless philosophical questions, to his audio lectures probing the mysteries of mind and soul, to his many books on surfing and spirituality, which marvel at the beauty and raw power of the sea, to read or hear Peter Kreeft is to be awakened to wonder.

And, of course, wonder naturally leads to philosophy, for what enchants our soul is what we want to think more about. Once again, Kreeft is like Chesterton here. Chesterton was never bored with the world because he wondered about everything, and thus he thought about everything and wrote about everything. Kreeft is a spiritual son of Chesterton, and he has awakened wonder in a whole generation of readers. It’s impossible to read Kreeft and be bored. Everything he touches he enchants.

Second, the intellectual life and the spiritual life are one. In 1960, Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a prophetic essay titled Theology and Sanctity, which begins with a troubling observation: In the whole history of Catholic theology there is hardly anything that is less noticed, yet more deserving of notice, than the fact that, since the great period of Scholasticism, there have been few theologians who were saints.¹ For the first 1,300 years of Christian history, the great theological pillars of the Church—Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Anselm, Albert, Aquinas—were also spiritual masters. They were, in the words of von Balthasar, complete personalities: what they taught they lived with such directness, so naively, we might say, that the subsequent separation of theology and spirituality was quite unknown to them. It would not only be idle but contrary to the very conceptions of the Fathers to attempt to divide their works into those dealing with doctrine and those concerned with the Christian life (spirituality).²

Kreeft models that same complete personality. He’s one of the few Catholic philosophers today who speaks openly about prayer and what we might call soul doctoring, the movements and longings of our deepest core. And he doesn’t just reflect from a distance: he speaks from personal experience and familiarity. It’s obvious that his goal is to form not merely great thinkers but great saints. And so, in his books and talks, he addresses both the mind and the soul, as a united whole. He generates both wisdom and wonder at the things of God.

Many philosophers stay on the intellectual plane, the realm of ideas and abstractions. On the other hand, many spiritual teachers focus only on the soul and matters of the heart, ignoring or even disparaging the intellectual life. It’s rare to find a major thinker who gives attention to both dimensions and blends them so seamlessly. Kreeft does this in his writings but even more in his person. His witness has provided a desperately needed model for budding philosophers, theologians, and apologists who yearn to be this type of intellectual, who don’t want half the equation, only the soul or only the mind. Speaking here on behalf of the contributors to this book, and countless others in our rising generation, we don’t want to become mere thinkers or mere prayers. We want to become saints. We want to follow Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Aquinas in developing a praying philosophy, a kneeling theology. Kreeft models both as well as anyone today.

Third, there are many strong reasons to believe in God. If you had to identify Kreeft’s most famous piece of writing, it’s probably his 20 Arguments for the Existence of God, which appears as chapter 3 in his Handbook of