Spiritual warfare event in Turkey prompts debate over veneration of Mary<\/p>\n
The spiritual warfare event that drew around 4,000 Christians to the site of an ancient Roman ruin in Ephesus, Turkey, earlier this month has prompted a clash between two senior charismatic leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cCelebration Ephesus\u201d marked the end of a major spiritual warfare initiative against the [data missing] \u2013 recognized as a leading world authority on spiritual warfare \u2013 identifies as the high-ranking demonic principality most responsible for blocking the spread of the gospel.<\/p>\n
But his assertion that one of her modern-day manifestations is as a \u201ccounterfeit Mary,\u201d luring many to wrongly worship the mother of Jesus, has drawn a reaction from Ralph Martin, president of Renewal Ministries, which encourages Catholic renewal and evangelism. The two exchanged views in correspondence made available to \u201cCharisma\u201d magazine.<\/p>\n
Martin said that while he was impressed with plans for the Ephesus gathering, he was concerned at \u201cwhat appears to be a serious lack of sound information concerning the place of Mary in Catholic doctrine and life.\u201d<\/p>\n
He wrote: \u201cCatholics understand worship as something due only to God. Any Catholic who worshiped Mary would be in grave error. Catholics give Mary special honor for what I believe are sound reasons, but we don\u2019t worship her.\u201d There were \u201csuperstitious and ignorant\u201d expressions of Catholic Christianity \u201cjust as there are of Pentecostal Christianity,\u201d he said, but these were not official teachings and should not be the criteria by which either were judged.<\/p>\n
Martin pointed to the pope\u2019s own declaration of \u201can infinite distance between Marian veneration and worship of the Trinity and the incarnate Word,\u201d and said that while Catholics may use similar language in addressing Mary as in their worship of God, it had \u201ca completely different meaning and value.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin said that while he agreed that Satan was \u201ccounterfeiting Mary and her role in the plan of God,\u201d it was important for people to \u201ctrain our sights on the counterfeit not the authentic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wagner, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., at the World Prayer Center, spotlighted the Marian link in his booklet \u201cConfronting the Queen of Heaven,\u201d which set out the background to the Ephesus event. He said that the historic roots of Mary\u2019s exaltation could be traced to Ephesus\u2013the last place she was known to have been alive, and previously the home of worship of Diana, another guise of the \u201cQueen of Heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n
Responding to Martin\u2019s concerns, Wagner wrote that when someone honored a dead person with gifts, prayers and pledges of allegiance \u201cthis seems to be to be just as much authentic worship as we see among the priests of Baal in the Old Testament, or the followers of Maximon in Guatemala today.\u201d<\/p>\n
For many Catholics, their allegiance to idols was \u201cat least as great or greater than any allegiance to Jesus,\u201d he said, distracting them from a personal relationship with Christ. This was underscored by the \u201cuniform testimony of the millions of Catholic church members who are defecting\u2026 throughout Latin America and swelling the ranks of Protestant churches.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are convinced that, had they stayed in their Catholic churches, they would today be on the road to hell and not to heaven. This is not to say that there are no true born-again, heaven-bound believers who have remained in the Catholic Church, and few would deny that. However, at least in Latin America, they are perceived as the exception and not the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christians from more than 50 countries took part in the four-hour worship event Oct. 1, which Wagner said he believed marked the breaking of the spiritual stronghold of the idol \u201cresponsible for sending more people to hell than any other.\u201d The gathering followed prayer team journeys to strategic sites around the world in the previous two years\u2013including Mount Everest\u2013to engage in spiritual warfare against the Queen of Heaven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spiritual warfare event in Turkey prompts debate over veneration of Mary The spiritual warfare event that drew around 4,000 Christians to the site of an ancient Roman ruin in Ephesus, Turkey, earlier this month has prompted a clash between two senior charismatic leaders. \u201cCelebration Ephesus\u201d marked the end of a major spiritual warfare initiative against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2380,2381,259],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}