On the Occasion of a Favorite Professor Turning the Pen on Himself

Peter Kreeft is an anomaly. He calls himself a philosopher — without irony, apology, or hesitation. That alone makes him uncommon these days. He’s also unabashedly Catholic, a point of pride in some circles, where his books have become familiar markers of faithfulness. You won’t hear him featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He doesn’t chase the Zeitgeist. But he turns out books as if he did — and he has spent just as long filling college classrooms, inviting students into what Boethius dubbed The Consolation of Philosophy. In a different era, he might have been one of Rome’s celebrated public thinkers. Instead, he’s carved out a steadier kind of success — in the lecture hall and on the printed page.

Kreeft’s gift isn’t just in philosophy — it’s in making the hardest parts of faith feel accessible. The all-male priesthood. Marian devotions. Mortal vs. venial sins. The many odd passages in the Bible. These aren’t easy things to explain, yet somehow Kreeft makes them make sense — and even seem reasonable. His books have become staples for many Catholics; they’ve also become bestsellers among born-againers, including at evangelical hubs like InterVarsity Press, where his titles have been popular for years.

Kreeft once jokingly tried to describe his writing style: “When they asked Mel Gibson what kind of a character he thought he had, he replied, ‘Somewhere between Saint Francis of Assisi and Howard Stern.’ I think my books are somewhere between G.K. Chesterton and Tim LaHaye.” It’s a laugh-out-loud line — and close to the truth.

Pausing here, I realize I sound like a fan. That’s because I am.

Kreeft earned his B.A. from Calvin College in 1959, pursued graduate studies at Fordham University, and completed postdoctoral work at Yale. After a brief teaching stint at Villanova (1962-1965), he settled into the philosophy department at Boston College, where he has spent the bulk of his career. Early on, he made a surprising move for a Calvin student: He converted from the Christian Reformed tradition to the Catholic Church. That was an awkward shift in the pre-Vatican II era, when Catholics were Catholic, Protestants stayed Protestant, and never the twain were meant to meet. A few Catholic thinkers had expressed sympathy for Protestant piety — e.g., Louis Bouyer in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (1954) and Gerald Vann even earlier in The Heart of Man (1944) — but these were maverick voices. Nostra Aetate, Vatican II’s decree on ecumenism, had yet to make the phrase “separated brethren” respectable. Kreeft crossed over before the thaw had begun, at a time when such moves were rare — and rarely encouraged.

Catholics, at the time, couldn’t have known they had just drafted a ringer when Kreeft knocked on a priest’s door in 1959. He was a brain and a character, one who would go on to become a one-man rhetorical fireworks show, tossing off flourishes the way most writers toss out commas.

I first saw Kreeft’s name in a magazine, in a full-page ad from Ignatius Press: “Books That Illuminate and Inspire.” It wasn’t a false pitch. A few months later, I came cross my first Kreeft title tucked away in a small Christian bookstore — the kind of place that’s almost extinct now. I stumbled onto a series he had co-edited with evangelical theologian J.I. Packer, published under the charismatic Servant Books imprint. One volume in particular grabbed me: Knowing the Truth of God’s Love: The One Thing We Can’t Live Without (1988).

Kreeft’s tone was different from that of most religious authors I’d read. It wasn’t just devotional warmth or theological precision — it was intellectual play, an eagerness to chase questions without fear that truth might somehow lose. He drew from philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard, poets like Charles Wesley, the Roman Missal, and C.S. Lewis. Yet what stood out wasn’t just the range of references — it was how Kreeft managed to sound at once both philosophical and biblical. I still tell my students: If you want to see what happens when philosophy gets baptized in the Holy Spirit, this is it.

That first book wasn’t the last. I haven’t read all Kreeft’s books, but I can’t be far off. My personal favorite remains Letters to Jesus (Answered) (1989). It’s a short book that barely made a splash — three teased sequels never materialized. Even so, there’s nothing else quite like it. Kreeft’s introduction offers a glimpse of the project and a taste of his style:

This book is not an attempt to “make the teachings of Jesus relevant” to our questions and concerns. They are relevant. Rather, this book tries to make our questions relevant to His answers. So my writing is not my questioning Scripture but my answering it (though the answer takes the form of questions). My questions are not challenge but response. Jesus’ answers are not response but challenge. In other words, this book is like the part Johnny Carson plays as Carnac the Magnificent, where somebody first gives an answer (like “No turn on red”) and he has to come up with the question (like “How does an Indian say, ‘Don’t double-cross me’?”). But these are serious. The book is written mainly for Christians, but not only for them. Its purpose is not conversion but edification, building-up. The point of the book is not whether or why you should accept Christ as the final authority but what that acceptance entails.

Packer endorsed it as “a brilliant piece of basic Christian instruction.” Yet when I once suggested it for a book group, the leader scanned a few pages — and balked. (To be fair, the Bible verses really are printed upside down.) You either get it or you don’t.

Since then, Kreeft’s catalog has grown, with a body of work numbering over a hundred titles — though that figure includes some revised editions and repackaged material. Accolades have followed, too, notably Wisdom and Wonder: How Peter Kreeft Shaped the Next Generation of Catholics (2011), a Festschrift from Ignatius Press honoring his decades of work. It’s a worthy effort. But scanning the chapter tributes, I sensed this group of admirers, peers, and protégés missed something vital. That something might best be called Kreeft’s organic biblicism.

Catholics have always honored the Bible, yet historically they have never quite matched Protestants’ zeal for it. (Of the Catholic reaction to the Reformation, apologist Frank Sheed once wryly observed, “A man can never feel quite the same about even the nicest book if he has just been beaten round the head with it.”) By contrast, Kreeft entered his adopted Catholic world with the happy habit of reflexively foregrounding Scripture. Like Sheed before him, he has consistently made the Bible feel central rather than peripheral or exotic.

Kreeft puts it plainly in You Can Understand the Bible: A Practical and Illuminating Guide to Each Book in the Bible (2009). Scripture, he says, is “God’s revelation, God’s mind, operating through your mind and your reading, so your reading is your response to His mind and will.” He continues, “Reading it is aligning your mind and will with God’s; therefore it is a fulfillment of the prayer ‘Thy will be done,’ which is the most basic and essential key to achieving our whole purpose on earth: holiness and happiness.” Then comes the challenge: “I challenge each reader to give a good excuse (to God, not to me, or even just to yourself) for not putting aside fifteen minutes a day to use this fundamental aid to fulfilling the meaning of your life.”

The Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon once said of John Bunyan, “Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline.” I’m guessing the same is true of Kreeft.

Looking back, the plumbline through Kreeft’s work is clear. His Scripture-focused books aren’t side projects; they’re the structural girders of the whole of his writing. Catholic theology, following St. Thomas, has long upheld both reason and faith. Kreeft does, too. But his early Protestant allegiance gave him an especially sharp ear for Scripture — and makes him an unusual commentator.

Typically billed as a Socratic philosopher, Kreeft’s bibliography spans questions of reason, ethics, and metaphysics. His biblical focus, however, seems to have accelerated with age. Three Philosophies of Life (1989) offers early meditations on Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Songs with a purposeful bent: “Song of Songs is the answer to the question of Ecclesiastes and to the quest of Job.” Two short, crackling overviews followed: You Can Understand the Old Testament (1990) and Reading and Praying the New Testament (1992). In the first, Kreeft tackles the Hebrew Scriptures and sounds more like Billy Graham than Fr. Raymond E. Brown: “Like the Savior he foretold, Isaiah was tortured and murdered, according to Jewish tradition. In fact, he was sawn in half. Most modern Bible scholars saw his book in half too.” He is referring, of course, to the theory that “First” and “Second” Isaiah had different authors, which Kreeft viewed with suspicion. “There are some good literary reasons for thinking we have two different authors here,” he writes. “But the three major arguments used to prove a double Isaiah are quite weak, it seems to me, without some qualification.”

Kreeft’s New Testament reflections also employ vivid imagery. He sizes up the four Gospels using Star Trek characters: “When I think of Luke, I think of Dr. ‘Bones’ McCoy — down-to-earth, sensitive, compassionate, and thoroughly human.” Matthew calls to mind Captain Kirk, “kingly”; John, Mr. Spock, “mystical and philosophical”; and Mark, all facts and function, is Scotty, the chief engineer.

Together, the three commentaries shoot through all 73 books of the Bible — yes, even you, Apocrypha. They remain vintage Kreeft: learned, lively, and at points only slightly mischievous.

Then came a pause — at least in the genre of books about books of the Bible. Kreeft busied himself elsewhere, notably producing Catholic Christianity (2001), a full-blown exposition of Pope St. John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church for the pews. That thick paperback underscores just how deeply Scripture and systematic theology mutually inform each other. The professor resumed his project of biblical survey with Probes: Deep Sea Diving into Saint John’s Gospel (2019), a collection of a ridiculous 1,450 questions designed to help individuals and groups study the fourth Gospel. Wisdom From the Psalms (2020) caps things off, capturing his affection for Scripture’s own hymnbook, or what another commentator once called “songs from a strange land.”

Most recently, there’s Kreeft’s Food for the Soul series — an ambitious, three-volume revival of the fading medium of the printed lectionary, offering a sprawling journey through Scripture with daily reflections keyed to the Church’s liturgical calendar. Collectively, the capacious tomes run nearly 1,750 pages. There was a time when everyone knew what a lectionary was; here, Kreeft reinvigorates the concept, giving it buoyancy as well as weight.

All this is to say that Kreeft probably wouldn’t call himself a Scripture scholar. But his books reveal a decades-long conversation with the Bible, approached not as a critic dissecting a text but as a disciple. His reflections have found an audience — and opened the Bible’s pages for many, including me. So again, count me a fan. As someone who once assumed the Catholic world had little use for Scripture, I feel I owe him a thank-you. This is it.

Which brings me to Kreeft’s new autobiography, From Calvinist to Catholic (Ignatius Press, 2025). It moves deliberately through the natural phases of life: growing up, going to college, starting a career. But the real subject is his shift from happy Midwestern Dutch Calvinist to contented Roman Catholic. (If that sounds like no big deal, you probably don’t know much about the Dutch American community or its social dynamics. Even Kreeft was surprised by how deeply his parents grieved his change of allegiance.) In the retelling, From Calvinist to Catholic feels like the missing preface to Kreeft’s bibliography — a kind of Rosetta Stone that helps decode how early habits of thought, prayer, and questioning shaped everything that followed.

The book itself is neither flashy nor confessional by modern standards. The cover indicates as much with its earthy hues, archival-style graphics of the two titular figures — John Calvin and St. Peter — standing in for the two traditions Kreeft crossed between, and no photo of the author. Inside, the story unfolds plainly: an American life shaped by familiar boyhood markers — baseball, classroom pranks, early glimpses of a wider world — but also by something deeper: an innate curiosity indelibly shaped by attentive parents.

It’s no surprise that From Calvinist to Catholic reads unmistakably as the memoir of a teacher. The sections recounting his student years are chockful of delightful details and vivid portraits of his mentors — and alone are worth the price of admission. As Kreeft dives into classes and questions of epistemology — a Yale professor famously compared one of his papers to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” — the reader realizes Kreeft didn’t just study under top-tier teachers; he himself seemed, almost from the start, to have been wired with the dizzying DNA to teach. These lively, affectionate passages offer some of the book’s most engaging moments.

Yet, in keeping with a kind of noble negligence typical of his generation, Kreeft offers little reflection on his inner spiritual life. He thoroughly traces the outer arc of his intellectual conversion, laying out the theological and philosophical reasons that drew him to the Catholic Church (his trademark ability to rattle off enumerated lists remains intact). But the inward story — the moment-to-moment awakening of faith — remains largely untold. “I was a committed Christian, but not particularly pious,” he says of his high school years, and though he describes his discovery of Catholic liturgy and tradition, he leaves unsaid how the Lord met him personally during those formative years. Clearly, something happened, but Kreeft, who early on declares, “I don’t want to wear my heart on my sleeve,” chooses to keep that door closed. For a writer so gifted at making faith feel real, it’s an opportunity missed. (Chapter 24, recalling his family’s reaction to his Catholic conversion, briefly parts the curtain in a moving exception.)

Still, Kreeft is often fun — and regular readers will enjoy the anecdotes scattered throughout. There’s no index to help, so here are some page numbers for the curious. We find him playing marbles (p. 28), growing up in an immigrant family (p. 17), wearing an “I Hate the Yankees” T-shirt (p. 22), taking fencing lessons for Hamlet (p. 47), nearly failing French and falling for Greek (p. 56), and going on a quadruple date (p. 45). Elsewhere, he shares how he came to write his first book (p. 60), his favorite sermon (p. 153), his favorite Bible verse (p. 179), and his favorite book on Mary (p. 136) — plus the true “Rubicon that no real Calvinist can cross” (p. 53). Opinions surface steadily: on Vatican II (p. 168), praise music (p. 64), the virtue of the fabulous 1950s (pp. 50, 164), and even why he believes in telepathy (p. 50). He’s stubbornly analog, with a standing allergy to all things digital (pp. 19, 34, 58). And then there are the touches only Kreeft would think to include: reading St. John of the Cross as a teenager (p. 41), pairing philosophers with composers (p. 90), and professing kinship with William Carlos Williams, poet of Paterson (p. 15), and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks (p. 143).

I’m not sure what I expected. The autobiography moves more slowly than Kreeft’s apologetic works — understandably so, given the density that historical recollection demands. Long stretches of theology punctuate the narrative, assuming the reader shares Kreeft’s inclinations, and, at first, the storytelling feels sporadic. Yet the Kreeftian touch, applied lightly, remains unmistakable. Stay with its pages and something unexpected happens: the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. By the end, it sings. From Calvinist to Catholic joins a long tradition of conversion narratives — Katherine Burton’s The Next Thing, Oliver Barres’s One Shepherd, One Flock, Ronald Knox’s Confessions of a Convert, and others. Like them, Kreeft’s story affirms that all roads, rightly walked, lead home.

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