From Calvinist to Catholic

From Calvinist to Catholic
Peter Kreeft (Ignatius, $28.95, 192 pages)

These pages review a lot of Peter Kreeft books because Kreeft, a Catholic, writes a lot of books, most of which are easily recommendable to everyone open to faith and reason. At the age of 88, Kreeft has published his autobiography, From Calvinist to Catholic, but it is not a complete autobiography, focusing on just one of “the three best things I ever did in my life,” namely “to become a Catholic.” (The others were to marry his wife and have children. His teaching and writing career as impressive as they are do not qualify.) In his introduction, Kreeft said the centre of the story is “not the traveler, but the road” and the road Kreeft took led to Rome. This book will help Christians understand why someone like Kreeft converted from Calvinism to Catholicism.

Kreeft describes his Calvinist upbringing and the first college he attended, Calvin College. Indeed, Kreeft considered becoming a Calvinist pastor. We are privy to the education that Kreeft received at home and in school, the books, music (“music has always struck me as the most profound of all languages”), and people who influenced him. He was taught to be suspicious of Catholicism by his austere Dutch Calvinist parents. His heart was headed to Catholicism long before his head, which must have made it easier for him to question his taught suspicion towards Catholicism and eventually honestly consider the claims made by Catholicism. A Calvinist teacher on church history asked questions that led Kreeft to seek answers, which led to more questions and more answer-seeking. Studying philosophy led him to be logically consistent, sometimes brutally so, and he found the most logically compelling answers in Augustine and Aquinas and the teachings of the early (Catholic) Church. He turned away from Luther and his antithetical posture towards reason (“the Devil’s whore”) and the organizing Protestant principle of protesting against. He found Catholicism’s teaching on nature and grace more compelling but he did not convert until he arrived at Yale in 1959, “rife with old Yankee anti-Catholic prejudice.” He compared the strong contingent of Catholics at the university to Christians in pagan Rome, a small, persecuted bunch that kept the candle of faith burning. Kreeft describes telling his parents, whom he had shielded “from my gradual growing interest in things Catholic.” He now realizes that was a mistake: “My theology was mature but my psychology was very immature.” Some 60 years after converting – two thirds of the book cover his first 30 years journeying to Rome – he acknowledges some lessons learned including “the fragility of reason as well as the blindness of emotion.” Elsewhere Kreeft says that good philosophy must be good psychology. In his highly readable From Calvinist to Catholic, Kreeft reflects on the philosophical and psychological reasons he finds Catholicism convincing.

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