Van Beeck wrote hundreds of thousands of pages of letters, treatises and books used today in Christian colleges and universities throughout the world.
Critics challenged van Beeck's attempt to define a single universal theme in the overall tragedy of the Holocaust.
They believed that such an attempt to explain the Holocaust as a metaphor or symbol was dangerous and could lead to a minimalization of the horrors of the mass murder.
Van Beeck's thought about rhetoric and proclamation culminated in the publication of the article "Divine Revelation: Intervention or Self-Communication" in Theological Studies 52 (1991): 199–226.
In 2006, Sacred Heart University Press published his Driven under the Influence: Selected Essays in Theology 1974–2004.