Peter Kreeft Quotes about Faith

We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

Faith is the root, the necessary beginning. Hope is the stem, the energy that makes the plant grow. Love is the fruit, the flower, the visible product, the bottom line. The plant of our new life in Christ is one; the life of God comes into us by faith, through us by hope, and out of us by the works of love.

The key to faith is love. We believe only if we love. Trust is the middle term; only if we love, do we trust; and only if we trust, do we believe.

Faith is not like bottled water but like rain. Its destiny is not just to be kept and held but to make something visible grow.

The block of marble is not the sculptor, and doesn't see that he's about to become a masterpiece... We're the block of marble and God is the sculptor, and the chisel is.... everything.

God calls us, just as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our old, familiar, little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way - just as a lover elopes with his beloved.

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.

Love is faith's flower, hope is its stem. Grace comes into us by faith, like water through the roots of a tree. It rises in us by hope, like sap rising through the trunk of a tree. And it matures in us by [love] as fruit matures on a tree's branches, fruit for the neighbor's eating.

There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.

Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel.

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

Your heart is like an infinitely large hole, and only God is big enough to fill it.

How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music.

The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.

The field of earth and of our human nature is now no longer barren but full of the seed of divine life. But it takes time for the seed to grow, for the Kingdom to come, and we are commanded to pray and work for that coming, that growth, even if we do not yet see the fruits, or even the blossoms, or even the leaves...

Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.

All of history is a kind of broken marriage and God puts it back together again.

Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs... It is like being haunted by the Holy Ghost.

God continuously comes into the world in two places - at the altar and in the womb.

Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.

Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.

A saint is Christ's bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent. A saint is also totally independent, detached from idols and from other husbands... A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. As with water, he flows to the lowest places - like Calcutta.

Thus moral theology leads us four steps deeper than law. To fulfill the moral law, we need love. To get love, we need union with God. To get union with God, we need the new birth. And to get the new birth, we need faith.