Thoughts about Kevin DeYoung writing about Peter Kreeft writing about becoming Catholic

In the latest First Things magazine, Kevin DeYoung has a review of Peter Kreeft’s new book From Calvinist to Catholic. Kevin DeYoung was formerly the pastor of the church we attend, University Reformed Church in East Lansing, MI, now a PCA church (a conservative presbyterian denomination). Peter Kreeft (88 years old now, golly) is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and was, formerly, also a Reformed Protestant, before converting to Roman Catholicism in college. I saw Kreeft give a talk once, way back in grad school, at the Catholic Student Center at Washington University in St. Louis, and have read his Handbook of Christian Apologetics (which I quite liked at the time, but would probably appreciate less now just because I realize how few people are actually argued into the faith).

And, just personally, I’m a Protestant who talks to many Roman Catholics, thinks Roman Catholics are doing some things better and we Protestants should learn from them. Put all that together, and I had plenty of reasons for wanting to read the review, and wanted to share a few thoughts about the same.

Prelude about DEI

Kevin DeYoung begins by sharing a medley of quotations from the book, and I especially liked this one, from Kreeft directly:

Yes, I am a critic of the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ police, because I believe in all three of those things and they do not, any more than Robespierre and the ‘reign of terror’ in the French Revolution believed in ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ as they claimed they did.

I share that because I would say the same thing. There is some protection here for conservatives, actually, because if you’re applying to a professorship and you’re told to write a statement explaining your support for diversity, at least in terms of what the word means, you can. (Golly, maybe diversity could mean that having one Republican professor for every thirteen Democratic professors is, you know, not the best environment for developing minds.) On the other hand, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this is what the Left does - take a word that has wide public approval because it is a good thing, twist it to mean something different, and run the scam for as long as they can. When too much of the public figures out what’s going on, switch to a new scam.

Protestants read the Bible

But it is more interesting to talk about Protestant and Catholic differences. Per Kevin DeYoung, Kreeft’s book is largely a Roman Catholic apologetic. DeYoung, unsurprisingly, finds it therefore largely unconvincing on those points, but there are some interesting things to say here.

First, a comment about Kreeft from DeYoung:

If a man is to be Catholic, however, I hope he is the Peter Kreeft kind - full of good cheer and with a Protestant-like appreciation for the Bible, a personal relationship with Jesus, and the need for grace (even if we disagree on the nature of that grace).

Good Protestant churches and good Catholic churches all, now, emphasize the importance of personal Bible reading. I’ve heard the priest of one Catholic church in Lansing say “we need to love our Bibles the way Protestants love their Bibles” - why thank you, sir. Over the last few centuries this is, arguably, one debate the Protestants won. Nobody is trying to suppress Bible translation these days (although we probably all agree there are some really stupid ones), we all think personal reading and knowledge of the Bible is important.

On that point, I have noticed that an inordinate number of the Catholics I enjoy reading and listening to are ex-Protestants, and I think one thing I appreciate about such people is that they’ve kept from their Protestant days a knowledge and appreciation for the Bible which, if I can say it this way, even makes them better Catholics (makes them better intellectuals at least). “Are you saying the cradle Catholics don’t know the Bible?” Some know it very well. But there is something worth considering here. A sort of theme that runs through DeYoung’s review is that Kreeft likes to say “Catholics are doing it better” - well, maybe they are, sometimes they are, but let’s look at the actual outcomes. Everybody says we want congregants who know scripture, for example - OK, who is getting their congregants to actually know scripture?

Per that point:

…Kreeft acknowledges that when he has asked the Catholic students at Boston College why God should admit them into heaven, more than 90 percent begin with “I” statements like “I did my best” or “I am a kind person.” According to Kreeft, about half mention God’s mercy, and fewer than ten percent mention Christ.

Run that same question in a Protestant high school and you’d get a very different answer. DeYoung goes on to basically say that even if Catholicism has some “more stuff” than Protestantism and that more stuff is actually correct, if it’s making the more important stuff harder to see, that’s a problem. (Maybe we could all admit, for example, to at least a theoretical universe in which saints can hear your prayers, can intercede for you, let’s say that’s correct, yet some people become so focused on that that they forget the simple message of the gospel.) And I do think that is a criticism that many Protestants who are, in some ways, sympathetic to Catholicism, would level at it. Catholicism has the gospel, but it surrounds it with all this clutter that can make the gospel harder to see. That might especially be true for the young and less sophisticated.

Protestants need to rediscover beauty

About Kreeft’s own conversion, DeYoung writes:

As is often the case when Protestants swim the Tiber, Kreeft’s initial attraction to the Catholic Church came by way of beauty and mystery…. “My heart started moving down the road to Rome earlier than my head.”

That has been my observation too. I know it’s a popular meme, but almost nobody actually sits down, reads the Church fathers, says “by golly, the Catholics are right about the pope, purgatory, everything!”, and converts. That just isn’t the path people follow. It troubles me a bit, but I think a few prominent Catholics today are also basically vibe-Catholics, by which I mean they love the beauty, they love the tradition, they would be demolished in any debate with a Protestant apologist… but (and this is what makes them vibe-Catholics to me) they also wouldn’t care that they can’t defend their faith in a debate. It wouldn’t bother them even a little bit. That isn’t why they’re Catholic anyway, they just like the vibes.

That said, DeYoung points out… but beauty matters, tradition matters, and maybe Protestants need to get their act together here.

One does not have to agree with all of the “more” to accept that Kreeft has identified a real weakness in many strains of Protestantism…. I love the Puritans and their emphasis on the word over spectacle and their concern for the “beauty of holiness,” but more than a few low-Church Protestants almost wear their utilitarian aesthetic as a badge of honor. Too many of us consider ill-prepared, poorly crafted spontaneous prayers the only way to be sure the Spirit is at work. Kreeft is right to remind us that personal prayers may be precious to God, but they are not public liturgy. As Protestants, we would do well to think more deeply about how formality, tradition, structure, and space are critical supports for our commitment to worshiping a God who is high and lifted up and whose glory is beyond tracing out.

That speaks well for itself, so I don’t have much to add. About prayer, I do think especially at certain times in life (someone dying or having just died, for example), people don’t particularly want spontaneous prayer. In a moment like that, a moment so serious, they want ritual, they want ancient, they don’t want to feel, at all, like something depends upon them.

Aside from that, anything can become a source of pride. Some churches are located in strip malls because they’re brand new and that’s what they can afford, and God respects worship in spartan surroundings. But if people are converting to Catholicism because they see beauty there (even physical beauty of the space), and this beauty is a good thing, and they are not seeing it in Protestantism, we should think about that.

Is Catholicism growing, or shrinking?

Just one more tidbit from the book review, if I may. Kreeft comments that he knows twenty people who have converted from Calvinism to Catholicism, and doesn’t know anyone who has gone the other way. DeYoung, without any citation, comments that all the data shows flow in the other direction - Catholicism is declining at a slightly faster rate than evangelical Protestantism. (A Pew Research Survey from last year seems to agree. 14% of people raised Catholic now identify as Protestant. 2% of people raised Protestant now identify as Catholic.) DeYoung also writes:

In twenty-three years as a pastor, I have seen literally hundreds of people come into the Calvinist fold from a Catholic background. Usually, the first thing they mention is that they never heard the gospel clearly in the Catholic Church and that they thought the essence of Christianity was about being a good person.

One might say a medley of things here. One, survey data is probably messed up a bit by the fact that Catholicism seems to suffer a problem of people who think they are “genetically Catholic” much more than Protestantism suffers the same defect - I mean people who don’t go to church, don’t particularly have Catholic beliefs about the world, but for some reason still call themselves Catholic, or did until recently. A recent article in First Things (a pretty reliable source about these matters) claimed that only two percent of the Catholics in Quebec attend mass weekly. Two percent! In what sense are the remaining 98% actually Catholic, one may wonder.

Two, I have wondered myself why it is, when I look at particularly traditional, conservative Catholic churches, they seem to be booming. Families are flowing into them, they’re adding masses, people are standing in the back, it’s madness. And we could all point to some high-profile conversions as well. And then at the same time I read articles, in Catholic publications mind you, about how attendance is collapsing and we need to do major consolidation of parishes to preserve vital life. I suppose a way to reconcile everything would be highly-localized, energized faithful congregations against a wider backdrop of generalized decay. But it’s weird to see both at the same time.

There might be a little bit of intellectual v. normal person thing here too. Anecdotally, there does seem to be a flow of intellectuals into Catholicism (which is probably the people Kreeft knows), but a larger general flow in the other direction.

Finally, and related, there is a claim here that Catholics who convert to Protestantism say they never heard the gospel in their church. I have heard many Protestant pastors tell this same story about their experience with ex-Catholic converts, so it seems to be common. I said that the “clutter” of Catholicism can have the effect of making the gospel harder to see (I also suspect intellectuals are better able to absorb the clutter but still keep the heart). I do also think highly liturgical environments can be a beautiful thing, repeating the same phrases week by week can drill them into your soul. What do you think about when you’re thinking of nothing? The stuff that is drilled into your soul. But they do require intentional engagement by the listener. You could just show up and mindlessly do what you’re supposed to do. You could get the idea that Christianity is not a thing you believe but just a matter of going through certain motions. If we need to shake people out of that (because, again, I think careful liturgy is a beautiful thing), that is worth thinking about too.

---