What do Osama bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Gene Applewhite, and the slayers of abortion doctors all have in common?  They all base their dangerous and destructive actions to a large extent on some particular message they believe they have received from God.  The receipt of messages from God is called, in many religious circles, spiritual gifts theology.

   On October 10, 2005, the BBC offered a press release with the headline:  “God told me to invade Iraq, Bush tells Palestinian ministers.”  The press release quotes Palestinian Foreign Minister (now Palestinian Information Minister) Nabil Shaath, referring to his first meeting with President George W. Bush in June 2003:

Scott McClellan, White House spokesman, immediately denied the charge:    “That’s absurd.  He’s never made such comments.”[ii]

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  True.  That story is absurd and extremely doubtful in light of the evidence that Bush has never claimed such inspiration even among Evangelical Christian groups in all of his political campaigns.  Such rhetoric may have swayed some Evangelical Christians, but it would be ridiculous to assume that it could sway Palestianian Muslims.  The Palestinian Prime Minister, the other Palestinian leader in attendance at the meeting in June 2003, identified by breitbart.com as Mahmud Abbas and by bbc.co.uk as Abu Mazen, recounts Bush’s comments as follows:  “I have a moral and religious obligation.  So I will get you a Palestinian state.”[iii]  This second account, by the Palestinian Prime Minister, is much more credible and much less indicative of psychotic entelechy based on a spiritual gifts theology.  It is one thing to say that one’s religious beliefs lead one to a moral obligation.  It is quite another to assert that God sent a personal message to fight specific wars.  Perhaps, Mr. Shaath elaborated on the message he heard from the President in accordance with his own preconceived notions of the President’s religious views, or perhaps he intentionally distorted the President’s words to cause Bush to appear to be a Christian fanatic to Moslem or Western audiences.  Regardless of the circumstances of this incident, it is quite characteristic of many American Christians to claim the type of divine inspiration President Bush denied claiming.

   In the last quarter of the twentieth century, spiritual gifts theology swept the churches in America.  Congregation after congregation, denomination after denomination began to teach and practice various spiritual gifts—both those listed in the New Testament and other newly discovered gifts that appear to have developed over the years.

   Clearly, the Charismatic Movement is largely responsible for this trend.  The defining doctrine of this movement is that the spiritual gifts mentioned by the Apostle Paul—including such obviously supernatural abilities as the ability to prophecy, heal, perform miracles, speak in tongues, and interpret tongues—have continued to exist in the church from the first century to the twenty-first century.  Moreover, according to many Charismatics, the trend should even be expected to increase “in the last days.”

is the Mormon church that prophecy and other gifts continue that the Book of Mormon is afforded equal status with the New and Old Testaments as supernaturally inspired messages from God.  The Book of Mormon was purportedly discovered in North America by Joseph Smith.  The book asserts that Native Americans are actually the ten lost Israelite tribes who disappeared after the northern tribes were defeated by Syria in the sixth or seventh century B.C.  The angel Moroni helped Smith translate the original tablets on which the book was written.  After the book was translated, the original tablets disappeared.  Other recognized prophecies of the church have also been considered divinely inspired.  These prophecies range from a prohibition of drinking alcoholic beverages, coffee, and tea to the (now abandoned) acceptance of polygamy as a family style. 

   One of the world’s three largest religions, Islam, is founded on the premise that the gift of prophecy continued to exist at least as late as the seventh century A.D.  Mohammed, living in that century, claimed to be a prophet of God and wrote the Koran.  Most of his prophetic hortatory messages are entirely in line with Judeo-Christian values.  Like Judaism and Christianity, Mohammed proclaimed the God of Abraham the true God and opposed  sins such as murder and adultery.  Like Christianity, Mohammed proclaimed Jesus the Messiah, the son of the virgin Mary.  Like the church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints, Islam prohibits the drinking of alcoholic beverages.  Like the Catholic Church and many conservative Protestant churches, Islam opposes the practice of abortion.  Unlike the Catholic Church, Mohammed resisted the elevation of Mary to divine status and denied the doctrine of the Trinity.  To Mohammed, Jesus was not the son of God.  On the more dangerous side, the world currently faces a serious problem with Mohammed’s controversial hortatory messages to slay infidels.

   Fortunately, the vast majority of hortatory messages that have resulted from the acceptance of spiritual gifts over the years have had positive results.  Since the church has solidly established a biblical code of ethics over the past two millennia, most hortatory messages delivered in the context of Bible-believing churches are very much in line with that biblical code of ethics.  When the occasional “messenger from God” exclaims that God wants us to kill someone, to steal, to commit adultery, or to lie, the church quickly condemns this person as a “false prophet.”  The biblical warnings about “false prophets” are simultaneously an admission of and a cure for the dangers of spiritual gifts  theology.   As  an example  of a hortatory  spiritual gifts   message

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that has had a positive result, I cite a note given to me recently by one who believes in modern day spiritual gifts:

Regardless of what other reactions readers may have to this account, most can agree that the result of the hortatory message was not negative.  One individual assisted another individual financially.  Benevolence is considered a positive result in most cases.

unable to cash either check, but the bounced checks and NSF fees damaged the woman’s relationship with her bank and with her husband.

   Many hortatory messages offered in spiritual gifts contexts are far more damaging than the preceding example.  Jim Jones' People's Temple, Gene Applewhite's Heaven's Gate, David Koresh's Branch Davidians, and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda all based their hortatory messages on the validity of spiritual gifts.  To ignore them is to continue to see cult followers and their enemies incur possible death.  In his Preface to Modern Rhetorical Criticism, Roderick P. Hart lists some reasons for a current "renewed interest in the study of rhetoric":

   Surely, we could legitimately add to Hart's list of rhetorical situations that produce risks the religious cults and movements mentioned earlier.  The fact that such cults and movements continue to arise indicates that rhetorical critics need to find methods not only of understanding such rhetorical processes but also of curing the underlying rhetorical excesses.  Using Kenneth Burke's concept of psychotic entelechy, we are able to find such methods.

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     More than two millennia ago, Aristotle coined the term entelechy [entelecheia] to indicate a process.  The process to which entelechy refers in Aristotle's writings is not an extreme process.  The process is not an uncommon process; rather, it is the most common process.  Entelechy, according to Aristotle, refers to natural processes.  Aristotle thinks of seeds, for example, as possessing within themselves the "final cause" or telos--the goal of what the mature plant will be.  He believes that there exists within a grain of wheat the formula that makes the seed first produce roots and a sprout, then grow a blade, which grows into a stalk, until finally an ear of new grain develops.  The plan for the fully grown stalk with its ear of grain is implicit in the seed.  To use a computer metaphor, the seed is in a sense "programmed" to produce a fully developed wheat plant.  The telos (or goal) of the fully developed plant is held in the seed and in the plant throughout the growth process.  Hence, Aristotle calls the process "entelechy."  "En" means "within."  "Tel" is short for telos, the goal.  "Ech" means "to have."  "Y" indicates "process."  Thus, "En-tel-ech-y" means:  the process of development (cf. Attitudes Toward History, hereafter ATH, 107) while having one's telos within oneself.  Entelechy, like many of Burke's terms, can be best understood in terms of a "philosophical vocabulary" that Aristotle bequeathed to subsequent generations.  Burke's friend, Classicist Richard McKeon, comments:

   [Aristotle's] influence on the vocabulary of philosophy may be taken as typical of his influence in general . . . for the technical terminology of later philosophical discussion is taken largely from his distinctions, but the terms to which he gave prominence were for the most part used in other senses than he gave them and in other contexts of arguments and suppositions than his.[vii] 

   When Burke extends Aristotelian entelechy from the biological realm to the symbolic realm, he leaves intact most of Aristotle's definition.  Burke employs the term entelechy in his theorizing in 1945, where his comment on the matter is little more than a brief summary of Aristotle's use of the "concept of the 'entelechy,' which [Burke, then] might call the individual's potentialities for becoming a fully representative member of its class" (A Grammar of Motives, hereafter GM, 27).  Although Burke there presents the notion that Aristotle's concept of entelechy was derived in a sense from a "Platonic theory of forms," he also distinguishes the "Aristotelian" view from that of the "realist" or the "nominalist."  Later, in GM, Burke defines the Aristotelian entelechy as 
 

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"the striving of each thing to be perfectly the kind of thing it was" (GM 249).  This sometimes biological, sometimes physical, "striving" is, of course, a "temporizing of essence."  The essence, for example, is already completely located, dormant in the seed.  The temporizing is the time-bound process of sprouting, growing, maturing, and producing new seeds.  Again, Burke distinguishes "Aristotle's more 'scientific' brand" from Platonism since "the Aristotelian 'entelechy' resided in the things of sensory experience" as opposed to "the heavenly family identity" (GM 253).  Still commenting on the Aristotelian entelechy, Burke offers one more definition of entelechy in GM:  "having its end [or purpose] within itself" (GM 261).

   Burke finds it necessary, however, to replace the implicit determinism of Aristotelian biological entelechy with the implicit freedom of human action in his concept of entelechy.  Certainly, by 1961, Burke has put in place the logological framework that characterizes the Burkean entelechy in its extension of the Aristotelian entelechy.  Burke here speaks of "terminologies that can be developed in connection with the 'logic of perfection.'  (A bright Greek will treat it in terms of . . . the 'entelechy')" (The Rhetoric of Religion, hereafter RR, 300).  And while Burke acknowledges that "[t]he Aristotelian concept of the 'entelechy' is essentially a biological analogy," that locates the "entelechy . . . as residing not just in the . . . seed, but in the . . . process as a whole" (RR 246-247), Burke is moving to "extend" Aristotle's biologically-contextualized entelechy to his own logologically-related entelechy.

   Burke later states:  "By entelechy, I refer to such use of symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain their perfect fulfillment" (Dramatism and Development, hereafter DD, 39).  Since Burke's concept of entelechy is described in the final clause in his definition of [hu]man--which definition, at its outset, distinguishes between the human's biological nature (animality) and his/her logological nature (symbolicity)--Burke is concerned with tracking down the logic of perfection implicit in symbols, terminologies, nomenclatures.  This concern is Burkean, not Aristotelian. 

   Implicit in the action of Burkean entelechy is what Burke calls the "temporizing of essence."  Burke declares that the "temporizing of essence" is "a major Dramatistic property":

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" . . . In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:  'You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.  For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.  Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them' . . . ." (Matthew 13:14-15 NIV)