biography of James Pike

[srigdon]

Uriel remarked that he didn't know much about James Pike on another thread. For those of you who don't, and you want to learn about him, I highly recommend this biography:

www.amazon.com/Passionate-Pilgrim-Biography-Bishop-James/dp/0375726160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259791479&sr=8-1

A Passionate Pilgrim: A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike, by David Robertson

An absolutely fascinating read which does a great job of illustrating his positive and negative sides. I was left with very mixed feelings about him. I think the liberal side in the church today is totally without effective spokesmen, and could really benefit from somebody like Pike today. He so obviously had a brighter mind and more gravitas than people like our current PB, Gene Robinson and Susan Russell.

[cec1964]

The Lost Shepherd: James Pike

I would think that a Bishop of the church should be the shepherd of the flock and not the wolf? I would think a bishop of the church should be a man of prayer, faith and makes a commitment to live a godly life? I have seen Ex Hells Angels who came to the Lord live better lives than Pike!


A Passionate Pilgrim:
A Biography Of Bishop James A. Pike
by David M. Robertson
Knopf, 2004
(304 pages, $24.95, hardcover)

Reviewed by Ian Hunter

Episcopal Bishop James Pike may be a forgotten man today, but four decades ago he made a big splash in the ecclesiastical pond, albeit usually because of self-aggrandizing, sometimes heretical, remarks. David Robertson, the author of previous biographies of the slave rebel Denmark Vesey and of American Secretary of State James Byrnes, demonstrates in this carefully researched and lively biography that there was ever less to Bishop Pike than met the eye. More important, he traces, through one bishop’s career, the sad decline of the Episcopal Church to its present ribald state.

Pike Enlarged

James Albert Pike was born on St. Valentine’s Day 1913, in Oklahoma. His father died when he was two, and thenceforth he was raised by a hard-working, indomitable, but sometimes smothering mother, Pearl, perhaps the only love that Pike never betrayed. Pearl was a Roman Catholic, and her son an altar boy before, quite suddenly at the age of 19, announcing that he had become an Episcopalian and she should too. She did.

Pike studied, and briefly practiced, law before deciding that he had a vocation. Since he was already twice married, his first brief (one-year) marriage had to be annulled, and Robertson suggests this was accomplished by subterfuge and incomplete disclosure.

Pike served as curate at a church in Washington, D.C., commuting regularly to New York to take classes at Union Theological Seminary, presided over then by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Robertson points out that it is bootless to ask what influence such intellectual giants had on young Pike: “Other men’s ideas and beliefs were like a concave, silvered vessel that Pike occasionally held up to his eyes; all he usually saw were his own features, reflected and enlarged.”

Pike first came to public attention for belligerent rhetoric—from the pulpit and outside it— on the right. In 1947, just as the House Committee on Un-American Activities was getting underway, Pike captured headlines by denouncing the faculty of Vassar College as “Unitarian, humanist, materialist, and Marxist”; his evidence was little more than one Vassar girl’s essay questioning the Virgin Birth (a doctrine the radicalized Pike of the 1960s would repudiate with great fanfare). Then he called on Christian churches to purge Communists in their midst and do battle against “secular humanists.”

Pike’s notoriety increased following his appointment in 1952 as Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. He got the highly sought-after position thanks to influential friends in high Episcopal circles, particularly two bishops, Charles Gilbert and Horace Donegan.

Among other initiatives, Pike launched a weekly television show on ABC called Dean Pike, which soon eclipsed Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s long-running Life Is Worth Living. The program made celebrities of Pike and his wife, Esther. They offered harmless chitchat about a topic, with Pike weighing in at the end to give what he called “a five-minute commercial for God.” Between 1952 and 1958 he also wrote seven books, including quite orthodox and widely read titles like Doing the Truth and Beyond Anxiety.

Never Behind

Never comfortable with Evangelicalism in any of its manifestations, Pike had spoken out, for example, against the practice of glossolalia or speaking in tongues. Any such manifestations of religious enthusiasm he condemned as “inconsistent with the sacramental theology of the Holy Catholic Church.” But things were to change.

Pike only gradually descended from this orthodox-sounding invocation to theological liberalism, then to gnosticism. Just when he became an outright heretic is difficult to pinpoint. As Robertson points out, he was an inveterate “trendy,” not wishing ever “to be even slightly behind the curve of a coming spiritual movement.” On the other hand, he often sounded orthodox; indeed, his last and fatal trip to Israel was undertaken so that he could walk where Jesus had walked.

Pike’s incessant womanizing and drinking caused ripples of concern in the church; still, in 1958 he was popular enough to be narrowly (by one vote) nominated to become Bishop of California (meaning the San Francisco area). By this time, he had publicly dispensed with the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, salvation by grace, and the uniqueness of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. (Today this may sound unexceptional, but back then such heresies were not commonplace.)

He won the election, but the process was divisive. First, his slippery annulment of his first marriage became an issue, and then opposition to his increasingly heretical views coalesced.

In San Francisco, Pike proved a good fundraiser and a capable administrator. But his personal life was increasingly out of control; for example, he had a clandestine telephone installed in the bishop’s office for the exclusive use of whomever he was having an affair with.

Esther filed for divorce in 1965. A year later, his eldest son, Jim, committed suicide at age 20. A year after that, his secretary/mistress, Maren Bergrud, killed herself in his apartment by an overdose of sleeping pills. He dragged her comatose body down the hall to her own apartment, lied to the police, and destroyed evidence, but was sufficiently composed to conduct her funeral service a few days later.

On three separate occasions, a bill of particulars alleging heresy against Pike was presented at Episcopal synods, but on each occasion, the bishops elected to follow the path of compromise, and a full-blown heresy trial was averted.

Pike’s last sad years were consumed by spiritualism. Through several “mediums,” he attempted to communicate with his dead son and eventually persuaded himself that he had done so. By this time he had become an embarrassment, and when in 1968 he offered his resignation as Bishop of California, it was received with alacrity.

In April 1969 Pike made life even easier for his church by formally announcing he was leaving, calling the Episcopal Church (in a Look magazine article) “a sick—even dying—institution.” In this, at least, the bishop may be said to have been prophetic.

Unusual Death

What should we make of Bishop James Pike?

Certain saints excepted, perhaps, any man’s life is a tangled skein of good and evil, right and wrong, darkness and light; that being so, it is churlish, perhaps uncharitable, to say that nothing so became Bishop Pike’s life as his leaving of it. But the circumstances of his death were, it must be conceded, highly unusual.

It was August 1969, the year of the moon landing. Fascinated by the news of a discovery of scrolls in a cave in the Qumran desert, Pike and his third and much younger wife, Diane, went to Israel and, against all advice, set out without a guide or adequate water to wander through the desert ravines around Wadi Mashash. They soon got lost. Diane eventually managed to walk out.

It took rescue parties five days to find Pike; he had apparently fallen from a canyon ridge about sixty feet onto a ledge. Baked in the merciless sun, his body was already in an advanced state of decomposition.

David Robertson has written a compelling, instructive account of a life ostensibly given up in the service of the church, but which will strike many readers as a tragic catalogue of squandered—or rejected—opportunities.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of biographies of Robert Burns, Hesketh Pearson, and Malcolm Muggeridge.

[Uriel]

I only knew his name, really, when I was younger; I seem to remember reading about his death in Time Magazine at the time.

What strikes me is that this is a person who died 40 years ago. Whatever his faults, he is not the present Church. I think your point is obscure.

[Uriel]

By the way, srigdon, I do agree that the liberal side of the church is lacking effective spokesmen these days.

[cec1964]

Uriel,

YOU SAID:
What strikes me is that this is a person who died 40 years ago. Whatever his faults, he is not the present Church. I think your point is obscure.


MY REPLY:

You are so wrong. Pike was just the start of the fall by laying the foundation. Now see where things have gone.

40 years ago the Episcopal Church was totally different than it is today. Pike then was seen as taboo because of his incessant womanizing and drinking caused ripples of concern in the church; still, in 1958 he was popular enough to be narrowly (by one vote) nominated to become Bishop of California (meaning the San Francisco area). By this time, he had publicly dispensed with the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, salvation by grace, and the uniqueness of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

(Today this may sound unexceptional, but back then such heresies were not commonplace.)

Now today you have seminaries teaching future heretics. At Sewanee 18 professors who demanded that Christ be removed from the University Purpose statement. if 18 Professors at a Bible college or seminary had even suggested that 40 years ago people would not even believe it. You have a church that is split and there are many more Pike's and some of these people are even worse. Pike was just the foundation and look what has happened over the last 40 years.

You have Bishops who do not even believe in the bible or that Jesus is even the Son of God! I could fill this whole page with stuff that is happening today that would make Pike look like an innocent virgin 40 years ago.

I have no idea how old you are. I am in my 40's and I graduated high school in 1981. I would not even be able to comprehend this if it had happened then much less when Pike played heretic in his time. In other 40 years from now there is no telling what will be considered the norm. I honestly and fully expect an Episcopal priest to perform a marriage with a man an animal in about 40 years and I am not joking. Nothing at all would surprise me in 40 years from now.

GLSEN'S 'FISTGATE' IN MASSACHUSETTS
The most notorious education scandal involving homosexual activists is a GLSEN-sponsored conference that occurred on March 25, 2000, dubbed "Fistgate" by conservatives. Three homosexual activists employed by the Massachusetts Departments of Health and Education led a youth workshop titled "What They Didn't Tell You about Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class" — part of the annual Boston-GLSEN "Teach Out" conference held at Tufts University. The "Queer Sex" session, advertised to "youth only ages 14 to 21," was attended by Massachusetts family advocate Scott Whitemen, who taped it while standing in the back of the room.

In the workshop, instructor Michael Gaucher, prompted by a teen's question, verbally guided the students on the mechanics of "fisting" — a homosexual slang term for a sadistic sex act in which a man inserts his hand and arm into another person's anal cavity. Another instructor, Margot Abels, said fisting "often gets a really bad rap," and described it innocuously as "an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with." Abels and Gaucher also guided the students on techniques of oral sodomy and lesbian sex.

The “Fistgate” tapes: Part 1
The “Fistgate” tapes: Part 2

[Uriel]

Well, Brother Paul (are you a monk?) I don't think you really seem to know what liberal Christians believe or espouse. But you can't know everything.

As for your "Fistgate"bit, that sounds pretty distasteful, but I kept waiting for a Christian, or Episcopalian involvement. Did I miss it by not listening to the tapes? I'll listen if it's there.

[cec1964]

Ariel,

I thought the hotlink of the tapes would have picked up. You can go here and listen or read the synopsis here: www.massresistance.org/docs/issues/fistgate/index.html

Now you ask if I am a monk. I will have to say the answer is no. I do not think I would look good in robes. I am just a man and I have sin because I am a human and born into a sinful world. It is impossible for me to be saved without God’s grace. This is why Christ was nailed to a cross and paid my penalty.

Now there are some who fall into sin and truly repent and desire the word of God and do their best to live that way and then there are people who DIVE into sin and make no attempt to live for God or truly repented. Remember, Jesus said the road is narrow…not wide. There must have been a reason he said that, do you know?

I will also tell you that the church in their liberal thinking is normal to human minds, law and would be normal for man to think this way. But it is man’s law, not God’s law. The one that counts when determining where you spend eternity, is God’s law. Why would Jesus even have to die on the cross if people like Spong, Pike, etc were correct in their warped beliefs? You don’t need to believe in the bible, you can join and worship a flower and live a perverted life because were all going to paradise from a loving God.

False converts have never “crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts” (Galatians 5:24). Therefore, like the pig, their natural inclination is to go back to wallowing in the cool dirty mud. Pigs need to wallow in the mud to cool their flesh. So it is with false converts. They never truly repented, and their flesh is not dead with Christ. Instead, their flesh is still burning with unlawful passions, lust, wicked thoughts and perversions. The heat of lust is too much for a sinful heart; the false convert (sinner) will always return to the filth in the cool mud. These people will die in their sins and spend eternity in Hell.

When someone is truly and soundly saved, you will have trouble keeping up with them. Someone who is soundly saved will desire the sincere milk of the word and cannot get enough of it. They’ll discipline themselves to do what is right in Gods eyes. They have a burning desire to share their faith to all who will listen. They have a burning desire to crucify their flesh and stop sinning in order to please God.

Ariel you seem like a nice person. I can tell by your post you are respectful and I respect you for that. I respect you greatly for that and I hope you know I do not mean to offend you or anybody on this board just because our beliefs are different. I will leave you with something that changed my life forever and my way of thinking. After I listened to these two audios (Hell’s Best Kept Secret and True & False Conversion) it changed my life overnight and I was never the same. You see I was a False Convert living my life in sin and lost from God. The sad thing about it, I thought I was right with God…but I was lost!

www.psalm19-7.com/hells_best_kept_secret.html
www.psalm19-7.com/true_false_conversion.html

Have a wonderful holidays and a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!

[Uriel]

Brother Paul, I have not taken offense. It would be rather prideful of me to say I never will, but so far, so good.

It is clear that you and I believe very different things about the nature of God. I absolutely do not believe that God is (and like Spong, I think it is improbable that God is a "person") waiting to pounce on us, now or in the afterlife, for getting it wrong. I think actions and beliefs have consequences, but that is rather different.

And as others here could tell you, I believe in the primacy, in fact the Godhood, of Love. So I can't believe that two people, of opposite or same sex, who wish to commit their lives to each other, are condemned. It is that simple, and that complex. An important element of our choice of life partner is physical attraction. When this physical attraction is combined with personal compatibility, and channeled into life commitment, we call it marriage. I do not think that the consequence of this is negative - quite the opposite.

And I wish you a Merry Christam also!

Uriel

[Uriel]

That would be "Christmas" - Christam - sounds like some sort of obscure Early English thing...