James Pike

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James Albert Pike

James A. Pike, Episcopal Bishop of California at San Francisco, 1966
Denomination	Episcopal Church in the United States of America
Senior posting
See	California
Title	Bishop of California
Period in office	1958— 1966
Consecration	1958
Predecessor	Bishop Karl Morgan Block
Successor	Bishop Kilmer Meyers
Religious career
Priestly ordination	1946
Personal
Date of birth	February 14, 1913(1913-02-14)
Place of birth	Oklahoma City, OK
Date of death	September 9, 1969(1969-09-09)
Place of death	Wadi Duraja, Israel

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James Albert Pike (February 14, 1913 - September 1969) was an American Episcopal bishop, prolific writer, and one of the first mainline religious figures to appear regularly on television.

His outspoken views on many theological and social issues made him one of the most controversial public figures of his time. He was an early proponent of ordination of women, racial desegregation, and the acceptance of LBGT people within mainline churches. Pike was the fifth Bishop of California.

Late in his life he explored psychic experimentation in an effort to contact his recently deceased son.

[edit] Early life

Pike was born in Oklahoma City on February 14, 1913. His father died when he was two, and his mother married California attorney Claude McFadden. The young Pike was a Roman Catholic and considered the priesthood, but while attending the University of Santa Clara, he came to consider himself an agnostic. Pike earned a doctorate from Yale Law School, and married Jane Alvies. He served as an attorney in Washington D.C. for the Securities and Exchange Commission during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal era, and also taught law at George Washington University. After his first marriage ended in divorce (later to be annulled), Pike married Esther Yanovsky. In World War II, he served with naval intelligence.

[edit] Conversion and early church life

At the war's end, Pike and his wife joined the Episcopal Church and Pike entered first the Virginia Theological Seminary and then the Union Theological seminary and began to prepare for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1946, first serving at a small New York state parish before becoming head of the Department of Religion and chaplain at Columbia University. He left Columbia in 1952 to become the Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. Using his new position and media savvy, he picked a fight with local Catholic bishops over their attacks on Planned Parenthood and their opposition to birth control and when invited to receive an honorary doctorate from Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee, he accepted but then publicly turned down the invitation after finding that the university did not admit African Americans. In an example of Pike's use of the media, he released his letter to the New York Times before it was delivered to Sewanee's trustees: they heard the news when reporters called for reactions.^[1] It was also at this time that he publicly challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy's allegation that 7,000 U.S. pastors were part of the Kremlin's conspiracy and when the newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower backed up Pike, McCarthy and his movement began to lose their influence. ^[2]

In New York, Pike reached a large audience with liberal sermons and weekly television programs. Common topics included birth control, abortion laws, racism, capital punishment, apartheid, antisemitism, and farm worker exploitation.^[3]

[edit] Election as bishop

After his election as bishop coadjutor in 1958 and his ascension to the See a few months later (following the death of his predecessor, Karl Morgan Block), he served until his abdication/resignation in 1966. At that point, he began to work for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal, private-sector think tank.

Pike with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a press conference after the march to Selma, Alabama.

His episcopate was marked by both professional and personal controversy. He was one of the leaders of the Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State movement, which advocated against John Kennedy's presidential campaign due to the pre-Vatican II Catholic teachings of the time.^[4] While at Grace Cathedral he was involved with promoting a living wage for workers in San Francisco, the acceptance of LBGT people in the church, and civil rights. He also recognized a Methodist minister as having dual ordination and freedom to serve in the diocese. Later he ordained a woman as a first-order deacon, now known as a "transitional deacon", usually the first step in the process towards ordination in the priesthood in the Episcopal church. The ordination was not approved until after Pike's death.^[5]

Among his notable accomplishments, Pike met with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his march to Selma, Alabama. His theology was profoundly challenging to the Church, as Pike wrote questioning a number of widely regarded theological stances, including the virginity of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and the doctrine of Hell and the Trinity. He famously called for "fewer beliefs, more belief."^[5] Heresy procedures were begun in 1962, '64, '65, and '66, each growing in intensity, but in the end the church decided it was not in the denomination's best interest to pursue an actual heresy trial.^[1]

He was ultimately censured by his brother bishops in 1966 for this and resigned his position shortly thereafter.

In his personal life, Pike was a chain-smoker, an alcoholic, craved attention, and was likely addicted in some way to romance and relationships.^[6] His charismatic personality drew many people to him, including his secretary, with whom he developed a romantic relationship that cost him his marriage to his second wife in 1969.

[edit] The Other Side

In 1966, Pike's son Jim took his life in a New York city hotel room following a period of recreational drug use. Shortly after his son's death Pike began to experience poltergeist phenomena. Books seemed to vanish and reappear, and safety pins were found open and placed to indicate the hour of 8:19, the approximate hour of his son's death. Half of the clothes in a closet were found disarranged and heaped up while the remainder were still in perfect order. ^[7] Pike led a public (and for the church, embarrassing) pursuit of various spiritualist and clairvoyant methods of contacting his deceased son in order to reconcile. In September 1967, Pike participated in a televised séance with his dead son through the medium, Arthur Ford, who served at the time as a Disciples of Christ minister. Pike detailed these experiences in his book The Other Side.

[edit] Death

In 1969, following an obsession with gnostic spirituality stemming from attempts to contact his dead son, Pike and his new wife drove into the Israeli desert. They were unprepared for the journey, and when their car broke down and became stuck, they separated in order to search for help. Accounts differ and an exact determination is impossible, though it is likely that Pike either fell into a wadi/oasis/creek bed to his death or else climbed in and subsequently died of exposure and thirst sometime between September 2nd and 9th. His body was recovered^[8] and buried (following his wishes and those of his family) in the Protestant cemetery in Jaffa, Israel. ^[9]

[edit] In popular culture

James Pike was a loose inspiration for the character of Timothy Archer in Philip K. Dick's book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Pike and Philip K.Dick were friends and Pike officiated at Dick's wedding to Nancy Hackett in 1966. ^[10]

Joan Didion wrote about Pike and the building of the Grace Cathedral in her collection of essays, The White Album, The Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1979.

In the song "Andy Fell" by Human Sexual Response, Pike is referenced in a story about the suicide of a student. The line stated "Someone heard him mumbling about Bishop Pike. He fell out of the window in the middle of the night."

E. L. Doctorow includes Pike as a fictionlised character in his novel, City of God, Random House, Inc., NY, 2000.

[edit] Major works

• Beyond Anxiety Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1953
• Beyond the Law Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, NY, 1963
• The Church, Politics and Society (with John W. Pyle) Morehouse-Gorham Co., NY, 1955
• The Holy Scriptures- The Churches Teaching (V. 1) (assistant author to Robert C, Dentan) National Council, Protestant Episcopal Church, NY, 1949
• Doing the Truth Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, NY, 1955
• Facing the Next Day see The Next Day below
• The Faith of the Church (with Norman Pittenger) Seabury Press, Greenwich, CT, 1951 (second copy Crossroads/Seabury Press, 1961)
• If This Be Heresy Harper and Rowe Publishers, NY, 1967 (also paperback- Delta Book/Dell Publishing, NY, 1969)
• If You Marry Outside Your Faith Harper and Bros., NY, 1954
• Man in the Middle (with Howard A. Johnson) The Seabury Press, Greenwich, CT, 1956
• Modern Canterbury Pilgrims (editor and essay) Morehouse-Gorham Co., NY, 1956 (also second, abridged edition, 1959)
• A New Look at Preaching Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1961
• The Next Day Dolphin Books/ Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, NY, 1957 also MacMillan Co. NY paperback Facing the Next Day, 1968)
• The Other Side (with Diane Kennedy) Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, NY, 1968 (also paperback, Dell Publishing, NY, 1969)
• Our Christmas Challenge Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., NY, 1961
• Roadblocks to Faith (with John McG. Krumm) Morehouse-Gorham Co., NY, 1954
• A Roman Catholic in the White House (with Richard Byfield) - Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, NY, 1960
• Teen-Agers and Sex Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965
• A Time for Christian Candor Harper and Rowe Publishers, NY, 1964
• What is This Treasure Harper and Rowe Publishers, NY, 1966
• You and the New Morality Harper and Rowe Publishers, NY, 1967

[edit] Biographies

• Robertson, David M. [2004]. A Passionate Pilgrim: A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0375411879. OCLC 53360781. 
• Unger, Merrill Frederick [1971]. The Haunting of Bishop Pike: A Christian View of the Other Side. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers. ISBN 0842313400. OCLC 141366. 
• Stearn, Jess (1968-01-28). "Bishop Pike's Strange Séances", This Week, The Baltimore Sun. 

[edit] See also

• Heresy in the 20th century

[edit] References