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Built For God Movement

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Why the BFG Handbook Exist

First the Content. Then the Mission.

The plan to renew the Church begins with a diagnosis. In Redemptoris Missio — the Mission of the Redeemer — the Church names the failure to engage in mission as a crisis of faith: The crisis is not in the act of faith, but in the content of faith—not simply whether we believe, but what we believe. The Church has to go on mission to be what it actually is. But it cannot go on mission without a Gospel to proclaim, and it cannot proclaim what it can no longer clearly state. That is why the crisis is only overcome when the Church is armed with the full content of the faith, expressed in language our own time can hear. This is exactly what the Catechism was for. Twenty years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, the Synod of Bishops looked at the confusion that had spread about what the Church actually teaches and asked for a single, authoritative text to settle it. Without that handbook, the work of proclamation could not get underway.

But the Catechism was never meant to be the end of the work. It was given to the bishops as the sure norm for teaching, and through them to every one of the faithful. What it was never designed to do is speak to the person who will never open it. That work still remains. And it is the work of laypeople. The same crisis the Synod named for the Church now sits in ordinary hands: how do we tell the story of God's love to a generation that no longer speaks the words we inherited? John Paul II answered that before he asked the question. New in expression. New in method. New in ardor. The content does not change. The doorway does.

That is why the BFG Handbook begins with the Tao Te Ching. Not as Scripture. Not as a second Catechism. Creation is God's universal language — the one text every people on earth can already read — and for more than two thousand years the Tao Te Ching has been one of humanity's most careful readings of it. It describes a way that is humble, self-emptying, and gives life by going low, and then it stops, because it has no name to give. We have the name. Paul stood in Athens and quoted their poets before he preached the Resurrection. He did not change the Gospel; he changed where he began. So the Catechism gives the Church the full content of the faith, and the BFG Handbook gives ordinary people a doorway into it — eighty-one short chapters, in language the world is already speaking, every one of them ending where all truth ends: in Jesus Christ.

“This book is a personal journey to the spiritual common ground between East and West—an important quest for humanity, and a worthy goal for all of us.”

— Derek Lin, author of Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, Award-Winning, Bestselling Author in the Tao Genre

Meeting every religion and nation in the truth they already know — and leading them to the God who authored it.

The principle in one sentence:

“Every truth, by whomsoever spoken, is from the Holy Spirit.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 109, a. 1

This is not a modern accommodation. It is ancient Catholic teaching. Truth is not Catholic property because Catholics thought of it. Truth is Catholic property because God authored it — and God does not stop being the author of a truth just because a non-Christian noticed it first.

What the Church says

Catechism 159

“God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”

Nostra Aetate 2

The Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy” in other religions, and recognizes in them “a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”

Catechism 843

The Church considers the goodness and truth found in other religions as “a preparation for the Gospel.”

Philippians 4:8

“Whatever is true … think about these things.”

See also: 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (“test everything; hold fast what is good”) and Sirach 1:1 (“all wisdom comes from the Lord”).

"Truth Cannot Contradict Truth'"

St. Thomas Aquinas

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