What would happen if
Socrates--yes, the Socrates of ancient Athens--suddenly showed up on the campus
of a major university and enrolled in its divinity school? What would he think
of human progress since his day? How would he react to our values? To our
culture? And what would he think of Jesus? Peter Kreeft, Christian philosopher
and longtime admirer of the historic Socrates, imagines the result. In this
drama Socrates meets such fellow students as Bertha Broadmind, Thomas Keptic
and Molly Mooney. Throughout, Kreeft weaves an intriguing web as he brings
Socrates closer and closer to a meeting with Jesus. Here is a startling and
provocative portrayal of reason in search of truth. In a new introduction to
this revised edition, Kreeft also highlights the inspiration for this book and
the key questions of truth and faith it addresses. – Amazon. (Revised Edition 2002)
Kreeft was born March
16, 1937, in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of John and Lucy Kreeft. He took his
AB at Calvin College (1959) and an MA at Fordham University (1961). He completed his
doctoral studies in 1965, also at Fordham where he completed a dissertation
under the direction of W.
Norris Clarke. He subsequently completed his post-graduate studies at Yale
University.
Kreeft joined the
philosophy faculty of the Department of Philosophy of Boston
College in 1965. He has debated several academics in issues
related to God's existence. Shortly after he began teaching at Boston College
he was challenged to a debate on the existence of God between himself and Paul
Breines, an atheist and history professor, which was attended by a majority of
undergraduate students. Kreeft later used many of the arguments in this debate
to create the Handbook of Christian Apologetics with then
undergraduate student Ronald K. Tacelli.
Kreeft converted to
Catholicism during his college years. A key turning point came when he was
asked by a Calvinist professor to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church
that it traced itself to the early Church. He said that, on his own, he
"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."
The "central and
deciding" factor for his conversion was "the Church's claim to be the
one Church historically founded by Christ." He reportedly
applied C. S. Lewis's trilemma (either Jesus is
Lunatic, Liar, or Lord): "I thought, just as Jesus made a claim about His
identity that forces us into one of only two camps ... so the Catholic Church’s
claim to be the one true Church, the Church Christ founded, forces us to say
either that this is the most arrogant, blasphemous and wicked claim imaginable
if it is not true, or else that she is just what she claims to be."
According to Kreeft's
personal account, his conversion to the Catholic Christianity was influenced
by, among other things, Gothic architecture and Thomistic philosophy, the writings of
St. John of the Cross, the logic of asking saints to
pray for us, and a visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral in New
York City when he was twelve years old, "feeling like I was in
heaven ... and wondering why, if Catholics got everything else wrong, as I had
been taught, they got beauty so right..."
Although a Catholic,
he places central emphasis on the unity between Catholics and Protestants. – Wikipedia.
I had been wanting to get this book for quite some time. I was finally inspired to order it when I found a couple of other Kreeft "sequels" at HalfPrice Books. It took a long time to get here, so long in fact that the sellers assumed it was lost and offered me a refund, which I hesitated to claim; I so much really wanted the book. And today it arrived at last, and I've started tucking into it with great satisfaction.
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