Get the Dr. Peter Kreeft Bundle for 37% off This June

Dr. Peter Kreeft is a world-renowned Catholic apologist and has been called the C.S. Lewis of Catholicism. He’s written over 60 books defending and expounding the Catholic faith, building a legacy of detailed and engaging scholarship. And this month, you can get 27 volumes of his most popular works for 37% off, for only $149.99, as part of the June monthly sale.

This 27-volume bundle contains his famous “Socrates Meets” series in the Socratic Dialogues (7 vols.), as well as 20 volumes of his theological, philosophical, and apologetical works. To give you insight into Kreeft’s heart for God and the Church, as well as the motivation for his writings, here is an excerpt from the introduction of The God Who Loves You:

Why write a book about God’s love? Why read it?

“God loves you”—isn’t that the most well-worn of clichés? It’s just standard filler for the laziest, most obvious and repetitive homilies. Smile. Yawn. Everybody knows that by now, at least everybody who has ever been in a church or read a Bible.

No. Exactly the opposite. It is not familiar. It is shattering. It changes everything. And most Christians do not realize it.

The Bible does not tell us what we already know. For instance, not once does it argue for God’s existence. We already know that by reason or experience or history or science or logic or common sense. Only “the fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” (Ps 14:1). But it does tell us what we do not already know: the nature of God. We do not know that “God is love” by reason or experience or history or science or logic or common sense. That is a shock.

We think we have absorbed that shock, since it hit the earth 2,000 years ago. But we have not. The shock waves have not diminished. They are still hitting us, but we are not feeling them. Not only do we not know what God is until God shocks us, we also do not know what “love” really means until God’s love shocks us. If the original shock has worn off, see Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. That will show you what love really means.

This book is an attempt to listen to those shock waves. But how could such a book be written? There is only one valid way to write a book about love: out of love. And there is only one valid way to write a book about the love of God: out of the love of God.

So the reason for the existence of this book is the same as the reason for the existence of the universe. God loved the universe into existence. And I loved this book into existence.

But I am not a great lover of God, but a mediocre one. So why should you read my book? Why learn love from a mediocre lover?

The primary book about God’s love is the Bible, of course, and no book can replace that, just as no building can replace the earth that all buildings stand on. But there are also hundreds of other books about God’s love written by great lovers of God: the saints. Read them, of course. But why read mine too? Why listen to a plodder in the valley when there are saints on the mountaintops?

First reason: Because the plodding pilgrim in the valley can at least see the mountain and appreciate its grandeur from a distance and call out to other pilgrims to tell them of the heights. Beginners appreciate books by other beginners.

Second reason: The Bible is like the ocean, the saints’ books are like rivers, and mine is like a tiny, babbling brook, but all are made of the same water.

Third reason: because even a tiny bit of new insight into the greatest thing is more valuable than enormous new knowledge of tiny things. And next to God’s love, everything is tiny.

Fourth reason: I have written almost fifty books, and everything in every one of them might be mistaken, but this one thing has to be true: that God is love.

Fifth reason: Because nothing is more joyful, more liberating, than that. If you could keep only one piece of divine revelation, and had to lose all the others, this would be the one to keep.
Sixth reason: because nothing more powerfully hastens you on your journey toward your appointed end, the end for which you were created, namely to become a saint. For a saint is simply a great lover of God, and nothing elicits love more than love. “Everybody loves a lover.” Nothing makes us saints faster than being hit over the head with God’s love.

That’s why I wrote this book.
But how can anyone write a book about God’s love? Isn’t that like trying to put the sun in a suitcase?

If all the seas with ink would fill
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every pen on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
Would drain the oceans dry,
Nor could the whole contain the scroll
Though stretched from sky to sky.

This is true. There is no answer to this last objection. Except that if I kept silence, the very stones would cry out.

Kreeft, P. (2004). The God Who Loves You (pp. 11–13). San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

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Kreeft’s work is rich in citations of the Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And in Verbum, this collection comes to life as all these citations link to their sources. Get the complete Peter Kreeft Bundle (27 vols.) for 37% off until the end of June. And be sure to take a look at all of June’s discounted resources.