Why is Dr. Peter Kreeft Catholic?

I’ve mentioned before that I think Dr. Peter Kreeft is the closest thing we have to C.S. Lewis since C.S. Lewis himself. He’s wise, imaginative, clever, whimsical, prolific, and one of the few sensible philosophers out there. And if G.K. Chesterton was the Apostle of Common Sense, Kreeft must be an apostolic successor.

He’s also one of the most famous converts from Reformed Protestantism to Catholicism (and was very influential in my own conversion). Kreeft’s dad was an elder in the Reformed community and he himself went to Calvin College. But it was there in the heart of Reformed life that he discovered the Catholic Church.

Today, Dr. Kreeft shares his entire conversion story over at the Coming Home Network:

“Then in a church history class at Calvin a professor gave me a way to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church on my own. The essential claim is historical: that Christ founded the Catholic Church, that there is historical continuity. If that were true, I would have to be a Catholic out of obedience to my one absolute, the will of my Lord. The teacher explained the Protestant belief. He said that Catholics accuse we who are Protestants of going back only to Luther and Calvin; but this is not true; we go back to Christ.

Christ had never intended a Catholic-style Church, but a Protestant-style one. The Catholic additions to the simple, Protestant-style New Testament church had grown up gradually in the Middle Ages like barnacles on the hull of a ship, and the Protestant Reformers had merely scraped off the barnacles, the alien, pagan accretions. The Catholics, on the other hand, believed that Christ established the Church Catholic from the start, and that the doctrines and practices that Protestants saw as barnacles were, in fact, the very living and inseparable parts of the planks and beams of the ship.

I thought this made the Catholic claim empirically testable, and I wanted to test it because I was worried by this time about my dangerous interest in things Catholic. Half of me wanted to discover it was the true Church (that was the more adventurous half); the other half wanted to prove it false (that was the comfortable half).

My adventurous half rejoiced when I discovered in the early Church such Catholic elements as the centrality of the Eucharist, the Real Presence, prayers to saints, devotion to Mary, an insistence on visible unity, and apostolic succession. Furthermore, the Church Fathers just “smelled” more Catholic than Protestant, especially St. Augustine, my personal favorite and a hero to most Protestants too. It seemed very obvious that if Augustine or Jerome or Ignatius of Antioch or Anthony of the Desert, or Justin Martyr, or Clement of Alexandria, or Athanasius were alive today they would be Catholics, not Protestants.”

Read the rest of the article here.

(HT: JonMarc Grodi on Facebook)