52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Incredibly Informative, February 12, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought (Paperback)
I purchased this book a year or so ago and while reading it, made copious notes and cross-references throughout and what did I do with the book? Left it on an airplane. Just my luck.
Anyway, this is an incredible book. Fr. Gambero demonstrates over and over again that the early church fathers clearly taught the idea of Mary as "Theotokos" (or "Mother of God"), and Mary as the New Eve. They also sought Mary's intercession, a thought anathema to most Protestants, and they took for granted that she was a perpetual virgin (from the earliest they rejected as heretical the idea of "Jesus's brothers" being sons and daughters of Mary).
Over and over we see great teachers of the early church espousing uniquely Catholic (and Orthodox) doctrine. Cardinal Newman said a century ago that to be deep in history is to cease to be a protestant. This book demonstrates how true those words are. You will find no 20th Century American Evangelicalism pervading the writings of the Fathers. These men were Catholic.
If you are an openminded non-Catholic and are interested in learning what the historic Christian interpretation of Mary really is, you cannot afford to miss this book.
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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for the Catholic Church's Teachings on Mary, November 29, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought (Paperback)
This book will clearly destroy any arguments from those who would think that the Catholic Church "invented" her teachings on Mary, and that the early Christians never taught or believed such things. This book starts from the founding of the Church and cites the writings of the earliest Christians and clearly shows how these early Christians WERE Catholics and everything they taught and believed about Mary is what the Catholic Church has always taught, teaches today, and will always teach. Sources cover the 1st century through the 8th century, and how devotion to Mary was something always practised in the Church--not a 4th Cent "invention". If you criticize the Catholic Church's teachings on Mary, then you owe it to yourself to be fair and open minded and read this book! You will clearly see how the early Christians had no problem with this devotion.
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43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Necessary Source..., April 17, 2001
This review is from: Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought (Paperback)
...for anyone who is interested in learning about the manner in which theology surrounding the Virgin Mary developed in the Church from the earliest of times.
This book covers the first 8 centuries of the Church which are generally referred to as 'The Patristic Period'. The importance of this work is it is a textbook example of the concept of development of doctrine. In this aspect alone it is valuable but it also aids in dealing with a subject (Mary) that is often so problematical for those our Protestant brethren whose faith paradigms are so far afield from Christianity as understood by those closest to the Apostles. Fr. Gambero's work highlights Newman's dictum of history being fatal to Protestantism well including pointing out the all-important Christological underpinnings of almost all Marian doctrines (including the pivotal core doctrine from which all Marian developments spring from: The role of the 'Second Eve').
To not confuse the reader, development is not understood in the sense of evolution (at least not of the Darwinian sense) where a teaching develops outside the body of beliefs (this is properly termed a 'corruption'). No, development is (to quote St. Vincent of Lerens - one of Newman's primary Patristic influences):
"The growth of religion in the soul must be analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. There is a wide difference between the flower of youth and the maturity of age; yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same. An infant's limbs are small, a young man's large, yet the infant and the young man are the same. Men when full grown have the same number of joints that they had when children; and if there be any to which maturer age has given birth these were already present in embryo, so that nothing new is produced in them when old which was not already latent in them when children.
This, then, is undoubtedly the true and legitimate rule of progress, this the established and most beautiful order of growth, that mature age ever develops in the man those parts and forms which the wisdom of the Creator had already framed beforehand in the infant... In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits...
This rather should be the result,--there should be no discrepancy between the first and the last. From doctrine which was sown as wheat, we should reap, in the increase, doctrine of the same kind--wheat also; so that when in process of time any of the original seed is developed, and now flourishes under cultivation, no change may ensue in the character of the plant. There may supervene shape, form, variation in outward appearance, but the nature of each kind must remain the same."[Commonitory Ch. 26 circa AD 434]
This book highlights the Lerens/Newman process viz. Marian doctrines/devotions admirably. A must have both for every bookshelf and anyone who seeks to witness to others about the authentic and truly ancient Christian Faith (and the role of Mary in the economy of salvation as understood by antiquity).
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