Religion: Heretic or Prophet?

THEOLOGY (See Cover)

It seems oddly paradoxical that 1966 — intellectually a most permissive year — should almost have produced a certifiable religious heretic.

But that situation is no more startling than its parallel paradox: the casting of doubt on such formidable Christian doctrines as Original Sin and the Virgin Birth, on the Trinity and the Resurrection, has made many men consider — or reconsider — them not with scorn but with respect, not with contempt but with intellectual curiosity.

For the doctrines now being questioned are embed ded in Western man’s heritage and, in the manner in which they help interpret sin and guilt, goodness and redemption, they have be come part of his psychic life. They have meaning, often unconscious, for a great majority of humanity — and profound relevance even in 20th century life.

Questioning the doctrines, the man of faith has had his faith strengthened. Examining the doctrines, the skep tic has been apt to find myths far stronger than reality.

Easily the most visible of the doubters — and the near heretic — is James Albert Pike, 53, the recently resigned Episcopal Bishop of California. There is hardly a dogma in the creed that Pike has not at one time or another denied. In doing so he has stirred up something new on the American scene.

A generation ago, a church goer who admitted to doubts about the Virgin Birth, say, would be clearly stamped among his fellows as a disciple of some such flaming modernist as Harry Elmer Barnes at best, or of Agnostic Robert Ingersoll at worst. In the fidelistic mood of the postwar religious revival, questioning was largely out of place — not because people had no doubts, but be cause they were willing to take the church and its teachings as a whole.

Now laymen feel that they can calmly decide and discuss among themselves what they are and are not prepared to accept. “It’s been a long time since the doctrine of the Trinity was cocktail-party conversation,” says the Rev. John M. Krumm, rector of Manhattan’s Episcopal Ascension Church, “but now it is.”

Instant Theology. Bishop Pike, who unlocked the discussion, is far from being a man talking his way toward atheism, and his reductionist theologizing is seriously intended to help put Christian faith on a surer, sounder footing. What Christianity needs, Pike proposes, is “more belief, fewer beliefs.” In the name of this jaunty slogan, Pike seems quite willing to jettison 20 centuries of Christian doctrinal development, if necessary, to preserve and emphasize what he considers the central, essential and irreducible message of the church: God as the loving personal ground of existence, Jesus as the suffering servant in whom God is seen as “breaking through,” and whose self-giving life is the exemplar for

Christians who would follow him to gain eternal life.

In sophisticated U.S. Protestant seminaries, such ideas are neither new nor, when properly elucidated, all that unnerving. Yet to many—perhaps most—Christians, they still have the ring of a betrayal of the Gospel. And besides the fact that it comes from a bishop, this doctrinal iconoclasm offends these people because Pike sets it forth in a sloganeering, Batmannerly, instant-theology style that seems almost calculated to scandalize them. Trinity, cracks Pike, is the word for “a committee God.” Too many Christian doctrines are “excess luggage.” As though reducing Christ to the level of the teenybopper, Pike describes Jesus as “the most.”

Honesty & Openness. A man of considerable wit and charm, Pike inspires intense devotion among many of those who have worked with him. “I am willing to fight for him forever. He is a great modern prophet,” says Architect George Livermore, a trustee of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Cambridge University Theologian Donald MacKinnon calls Pike “a man of integrity and humility, with a remarkable honesty and openness of mind.” Even Billy Graham, whose theological views are poles apart from Pike’s, considers him a friend.

On the other hand, Pike is widely excoriated as a grandstanding publicist, a Unitarian in Episcopal robes, even an atheist in disguise. The Rev. Glen Braswell, executive secretary of the Colorado Baptist General Convention, fumes at Pike as “a prophet of the devil. He UPI is nonChristian, and as a theologian he is attempting to destroy the Christian faith.”

Proud of its tradition as the middle way between Rome and Reformation, the Anglican Communion has traditionally tolerated a degree of latitude in doctrinal interpretation that baffles outsiders. Yet there are plenty of Episcopalians who feel that Pike has long since crossed the frontier of permissible heterodoxy.

Four times since Pike was ordained a priest in 1946, groups of Episcopal clergymen have denounced him as a heretic and demanded that he be brought to trial.

“Irresponsible.” Last month’s accusation was the most serious. Shortly after Pike resigned as Bishop of California to become a resident member of Robert Hutchins’ Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, South Florida’s Anglo-Catholic Bishop Henry Louttit, backed by more than 30 other prelates, drew up a petition calling for a church court to try Pike for heresy. The move was forestalled only when the House of Bishops agreed to approve a statement of principles that denounced Pike’s theologizing as “offensive” and “irresponsible”—terms as harsh as any church court might have used.

The statement was not reached without a paroxysm of agonizing and soul-searching. Much as they deplored Pike’s flippant way with church teaching, few bishops consider him serious or deep enough a theologian to be considered a heretic. But they also feel strongly, as one leading prelate put it, that “Jim has gone off on his own,” without regard to the thoughts and judgments of his peers —and a bishop is above all a symbol of unity within the church. At the same time, the Episcopal hierarchy shuddered at the thought of a heresy trial’s impact on the church, and for the conclusion of the report they devised a double-edged sentence that demonstrated their deep feelings: “We do not think his often obscure and contradictory utterances warrant the time and the work and the wounds of a trial.”

Belief & Creed. Certainly there was nothing more calculated to make Pike appear to many churchmen as a sympathetic and possibly heroic figure than the idea of trying him as a heretic. However exasperated they may be by Pike’s antidogmatism, Episcopalians generally seem to share their bishops’ feeling that a trial was out of order. However much they may wince at his gaucheries or blanch at his glib demythologizing of church teachings, plenty of theologians agree with what Pike is trying to do, if not with the way he does it. Pike, says Episcopal Bishop Stephen Bayne, a member of the committee that drafted the statement, “has awakened a lot of people to the fact that a lot of theology is wordmongering—and that there is nothing behind the words.” Cambridge University Theologian Hugh Montefiore admires Pike for “putting aside the intricacies of dogmatic theology to concentrate on the big issues for the ordinary man: What is the nature of Christ? In what sense can anything be said to be supernatural?”

For millions of ordinary Christians, there is no real reason to worry or debate the Trinity, the Resurrection or any other doctrine. Billy Graham does not want to tamper with what the Bible says or find new verbal “packages” for what the creedal formulas profess. “In my evangelistic crusades,” he says, “I have found that thousands upon thousands of people on every continent will eagerly listen to the same Gospel that Paul preached in the 1st century.”

From another viewpoint, some radical Christian thinkers shrug off Pike’s intellectual wrestling with doctrine as simply uninteresting. “The younger men don’t even raise the issue of the Virgin

Birth or Original Sin,” says Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago Divinity School. “They’re discussing the existence of God. And if there’s no God, you don’t have to argue about any of the other doctrines.” The big concern of still others is the social role of the church. More important than questioning old dogma, says the World Council of Churches’ Albert van den Heuvel, is the task of creating a new Christian ethic that can adequately deal with such mammoth issues as world hunger, racial equality, war.

Trinitarian Mystery. Midway between total faith and total rejection lies the intellectual agony of Christendom: the task of interpreting God’s message to man in doctrine. Perhaps the only constant in dogmatic history is development, change and discovery. The original kerygma (proclamation) of Christ’s apostles, as transmitted to his followers in an oral tradition of Jesus’ teachings, had a pristine simplicity. As Paul put it in II Corinthians, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” But Paul himself, as much Greek as Jew, used a different and more powerful language to proclaim Christ than did Jesus’ simple fishermen followers in Jerusalem. And the more Christianity escaped from its Palestinian setting into the broader Mediterranean world, the more it turned to non-Hebraic languages and concepts to convey its central truths.

No Christian concept took more agony and wisdom to formulate than what is probably the central and most impenetrable mystery of the church: the Trinitarian doctrine of three persons in one God. The word Trinity is not in Scripture, although the idea is there in Paul’s reference to “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” Tertullian, in the 3rd century, was apparently the first to formulate the term trinitas, giving theological definition to the idea in revelation that God was Lord of the universe, father of Christ and the continuing source of the church’s life.

Second-Coming Symbolism. When the Arian heretics proposed that Christ, while divine, was not equal to God the Father, the Council of Nicaea in 325 turned to a word derived from Hellenic philosophy, homoousia, to express its conviction that Jesus was of the same “substance” with the Father. At the Council of Constantinople, 56 years later, church fathers responded to heresy by defining the divinity of the Holy Spirit and proclaiming that the three “persons,” or hypostases, were coequal manifestations of one God.

Each age has come to its own insights into the meaning of Christ’s words and deeds; each new interpretation of the Christian message has generally been in the direction of less literal, more symbolic truth. Jesus’ first followers, for example, interpreted Christ’s promise of a second coming as meaning his immediate return to earth. Only when the expectation faded did the church come to see his words as an eschatological mystery, a symbol of the end of history.

Neither Judaism nor the New Testament has much to say about afterlife: it was during the Middle Ages, when life was nasty, brutish and short, that the church developed a full doctrine of immortality. Spiritually unsatisfied by the Pelagian tendencies—salvation by good works—of late medieval Catholicism, Martin Luther found fresh and momentous insight in an all but ignored phrase of Paul’s: that man is justified by grace through faith.

Seeing the Gospel in its own terms, every age has tried to convey its message in contemporary language. Never before, however, have so many felt the need for so much redefinition. Science, technology, affluence and secularism have eased God out of the cosmos, all but obliterated the supernatural dimension of life. Urbanization has made the rural imagery of Scripture incomprehensible to “hungry sheep” who have never seen one. A radically aggressive atheism demands God’s death for the sake of human freedom. New philosophies stare uncomprehendingly at seemingly static Christian doctrines 1,500 years old. For Christians, the age of anxiety is the age of ebbing faith, and Bishop Pike is not the only prophet crying out for the church to restate, reshape, renew. “Now is the time to renew, while there are still people in the church to renew with,” he exhorts. “This is no time for fastidiousness, but one for boldness of stating what we can affirm and joyousness in acting it out. The church must speak to and act in the world it is in.”

A Spiritual Odyssey. If Pike feels this need for renewal with a special intensity, it may well stem from his experience in wavering between faith and doubt. His widowed mother, a schoolteacher, raised him as a Roman Catholic, and during his school years in Oklahoma City and Hollywood, he recalls, “I was what you would call devout. I was with it all the way—frequently a weekday communicant, an acolyte, the whole bit.”

Pike went on to the Jesuits’ University of Santa Clara with vague hopes of studying some day for the priesthood. Rather than stilling his first quiet doubts about Christian doctrine, the Jesuits increased them. Pike was jolted by the inconsistency between what he learned in the physics lab and what he was taught in philosophy class, bothered still more by his inability to accept natural law—the concept that there are certain God-given laws of behavior known to man by reason alone rather than revela tion. By the end of his sophomore year, Pike had decided that he could not be a priest, and transferred first to U.C.L.A. and then to the University of Southern California to enter law school.

Spiritually speaking, Pike “went over the wall. I was a free guy. It was glorious. I was vaguely a humanist, caring about good causes and truth, but the religious question didn’t concern me. I wasn’t antichurch; I just dropped out.” He went on from U.S.C. to gain a doctorate in jurisprudence at Yale, and then to Washington to work for the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1938. “I was a fervent humanist when I went to work for the New Deal,” Pike says. “I had a real sense of cause, of saving the widows and orphans from being robbed by Wall Street.” He became engaged to another agnostic, Esther Yanovsky, and together they drew up their own marriage service; much to their dismay, the judge who presided at their 1942 wedding* blandly used the formula from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

“Vatican Roulette.” After World War II broke out, Pike got a commission in Naval Intelligence but stayed in Washington. War, that great upsetter of human routine, started him thinking again about what he calls “the big question,” and he began occasionally going back to church. One Easter Sunday, at Washington’s National Cathedral, Pike was overwhelmed by the beauty of the liturgy and its music, and pondered becoming an Episcopalian—mostly because “it looked like a church ought to look,” and had “an intellectual sophistication and breadth.” In 1944, the Pikes were remarried in church—”with our first daughter Cathy in the baby buggy down the aisle behind us”—and he began to study for holy orders.

Ordained in 1946, Pike took over as rector of Christ Church in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and rebuilt a moribund parish; on the side, he undertook some “whistlestop mission preaching” that honed his skills at improvising in the pulpit. In 1949, he took over as chaplain at Columbia University and head of its meager religion department. Pike brought in good new teachers, including Paul Tillich as an adjunct professor. To upgrade his own academic credentials, Pike submitted chapters of his book Faith of the Church (written with Norman Pittenger and still used in Episcopal lay teaching), plus some other writing and his law doctorate, and got a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary without taking a single course in theology. In 1952, Bishop Horace Donegan offered him the long-vacant post of dean of St. John the Divine Cathedral.

Dean Pike became something of an official gadfly and unofficial spokesman for the Episcopal Church. Theologically, even though he had read Tillich and Niebuhr, Pike then was what he calls “smoothly orthodox. I was still a lawyer. I had just changed clients. I was an apologist. My feeling was that you’ve got to make the church’s institution look good.” On nondoctrinal controversy, however, he was an unapologetic independent. From the pulpit or on his nationwide Dean Pike TV show, he tangled with Cardinal Spellman on movie censorship, preached against Joe McCarthy, battled for birth control (calling the rhythm method “Vatican roulette”), and shook up Southern Episcopal prelates by refusing to accept a proffered honor from the segregated University of the South School of Theology on the ground that he “didn’t want a degree in white divinity.”

In spring 1958, the former Roman Catholic and agnostic became Episcopal Bishop Coadjutor of California, with the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, then Presiding Bishop of the church, performing the consecration. That fall, Pike took sole charge of a “fast-growing diocese with a half-finished cathedral and no budget.” He managed to raise enough money to complete the cathedral, including stained-glass windows that honor not only time-tested saints but Astronaut John Glenn and the contemporary Jesuit Theologian Karl Rahner. In 1960, Pike lent his Grace Cathedral pulpit to United Presbyterian Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake, who thereupon made one of the century’s most creative ecclesiastical proposals: the union of four major U.S. Protestant bodies (Blake’s Presbyterians, the Methodists, Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ) into one big catholic-but-reformed superchurch.

In Black & White. Christian Century magazine in 1960 asked Pike to contribute an article for a series on “How My Mind Has Changed.” Here, for the first time, Pike set forth his growing sense that much church doctrine needed to be demythologized: “I put in black and white the fact that I would not affirm the literal Virgin Birth; I said that the concept of the Trinity did not speak to me; and I questioned whether salvation was possible through Jesus Christ alone.”

The churchwide uproar over this article forced Pike to spend more time exploring modern theology, and in 1963 he set out to write a positive statement of what he believed. “I wanted to show them that I was really a Christian,” Pike says. “I had hoped the book would relax everybody and be a unifying gesture.” Pike was well along with the book when Anglican Bishop A. T. Robinson sent him an advance copy of Honest to God. Inspired by Robinson’s daring attack on a God-image “out there” in space, Pike junked his outline, turned A Time for Christian Candor into an essay on theological reductionism: “There are no absolutes but God.” Pike had explicitly abandoned the three-person God along with the incarnation of God in Jesus by the time he wrote his next book, What Is This Treasure. More and more caught up in theological exploration, Pike last year took a six-month sabbatical to study in England at Cambridge, came back convinced that his real vocation was as a scholar-teacher. Returning to his Episcopal duties, says Pike, “I felt like a canary bird in a badminton game,” and he happily accepted Hutchins’ offer to become a resident “worker-bishop” at Santa Barbara”. Some of his friends, who feel that he is no more a scholar than a diocesan administrator, wonder how long he will be content to stay there.

Personal Agony. Pike’s opening out to radical theology coincided with a time of personal stress and agony. Long a puissant martini-sipper, he finally faced up to the reality that drink was getting to be a problem, and quit. “The date was June 30, 1964,” he recalls. “I stopped cold, and have had nothing to drink, not even wine at communion, since that day.” He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and set up a diocesan alcoholic rehabilitation center, emphasizing psychological help. He also had to overcome some marriage problems; now, while he lives and works in Santa Barbara, his wife maintains the family house in San Francisco. Jim comes up on weekends to teach a class at the University of California Law School in Berkeley and to see his children.

The most shattering blow came last February when his eldest son James Jr. committed suicide in a New York hotel room. What made the death doubly hard to bear was that James Jr. had been to Cambridge with Pike; there, father and son had become friends. “We seemed to be communicating at a new level of depth as adult persons,” says Pike. “We shared a continuous dialogue on idea levels. There was a real knowing of one another and a real joy.”

“Overbelief.” Now as always, Pike’s theology seems to be in a state of flux, but he is prepared to make certain religious affirmations. About God, Pike rejects the traditional teaching of an omniscient, omnipotent creator as not empirically justified by the data. “All this ‘omni’ business,” he submits, is “overbelief” and “extrapolating to the skies.” Instead, Pike proposes a more limited, non-supernatural God-within-the-world, who is both the ground of being and the source of explanation of the uniqueness of the human person.

“I observe around me a certain measure of order, predictability, which flows from order, beauty, love, grace. By faith, I make an affirmation that there is a constellating, unifying, organizing, centering and evolving unus,” says Pike. This center of life, or God, is also the source of the difference between a man and an object: “I affirm that God is what we mean by the word personal.”

Because of the uniqueness of “person-hood,” Pike is convinced that there is eternal life—and currently he is interested in exploring further such psychic phenomena as extrasensory perception, psychedelic experience, and communication with “persons beyond.”

Personhood leads Pike to stress ethics and its relation to “the struggle of life.”

No code fancier, he strongly advocates situation morality, which he feels is most in keeping with an “open, unblocked, unidolatrous” style of life that existentially responds to the confrontations and relationships that man faces. “The prime image of this style,” says Pike, “is the servant or man-for-others image of Jesus. Courageous, honest with everybody to the point of their understanding him. Love at every point along the way.”

“In number of items, I would have to agree that I don’t believe very much,” Pike admits. “But until I have lived out all these affirmations, I don’t think I’ll be looking around for more doctrines. These are the things I can affirm, based on real data and modest faith inferences.” All dogmas, he argues, are but “earthen vessels” in which Christians have tried to contain the divine message—and most of them are outdated, irrelevant or useless today.

On the Virgin Birth, Pike believes that the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke are relatively late additions to the New Testament, put in with a propaganda rather than historical purpose, since it was common practice in the Mediterranean world to provide a miraculous birth for gods and heroes. As for the Trinity, Pike argues that by sticking to the three-persons-in-one-God teaching, the church seems to be preaching three gods rather than one. “The Moslems,” Pike jokes, “offer one God and three wives;* we offer three Gods and one wife.” All the actions customarily attributed to the individual persons, insists Pike, could more simply and accurately be attributed to God alone.

Glib Skimmer. This reductionist faith of Pike’s exposes him to universal attack. Even Christian Atheist William Hamilton gently chides Pike for defending orthodoxy by continuing to affirm that God is alive. One major criticism is that Pike is a shallow and derivative thinker who much too glibly skims the cream from other men’s insights —demythologizing from Bultmann, a ground-of-being God from Tillich, Jesus as the man for others from Bonhoeffer.

Another and more telling argument is that Pike has consistently failed to see that even when a Biblical fact no longer seems to be literally true or when the language of a doctrine no longer seems relevant, the spiritual quality behind the words still has a meaning and a message of value. Union Theological Seminary’s John Macquarrie faults Pike’s dismissal of difficult doctrine as excess baggage. “The Christian faith as a whole has a unity,” he says. “The various doctrines have to be taken together. You can’t pick and choose—here’s a doctrine I can go along with and here’s one I can do without.” Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak of Stanford suggests that Pike might be guilty of intellectual laziness: “Every traditional doctrine has a point, but one does not discover the point without working at it.”

The classic instance is the doctrine of Original Sin and the story of man’s fall. The account of Eden in Genesis is not to be taken literally: Adam is a symbol of man in general, rather than a specific person, and the forbidden fruit was clearly a most imaginary apple. Thus, as Lutheran Theologian Joseph Sittler of the University of Chicago argues, “the doctrine of Original Sin is not fundamentally a teaching of the biological transmission of moral defect. The doctrine is rather an invitation to the mind to ponder the force, scope, power and depth of evil—what Scripture calls the mystery of iniquity. It is a sound doctrine.” Reinhold Niebuhr likewise regards Original Sin as a symbolic expression of man’s incorrigible tendency to do wrong: “The idea of the Fall is essential to the Christian message and to an understanding of the human situation.”

The Virgin Birth. With the exception of Pike, theologians and church leaders take it as their duty not to discredit publicly the literal understanding of the Virgin Birth, but many of them hold that the doctrine is essentially a myth—meaning not a story that is untrue but a story that conveys a poetic truth more majestic and significant than mere fact. The point of Virgin Birth accounts is that there is something divine about Jesus and that man should learn from him to change his way of life. Karl Barth sees a profound theological meaning in the story, on the ground that the human existence of Jesus Christ “starts in the freedom of God Himself, in the freedom in which the Father and Son are one in the bond of love.” Roman

Catholic Theologian Paul Hilsdale of Loyola University of Los Angeles, who is not prepared to admit that the story is simply legend, spies a sociological significance. The idea that Mary conceived without the aid of a man was a startling thought in a culture where woman was a second-class citizen; thus the story could be interpreted as a forerunner of today’s equality of the sexes.

The Resurrection of Christ is another church teaching that theologians today are inclined to interpret not as meaning a reconglomeration of atoms in a cadaver but as the Apostles’ unique and mysterious awareness of who Christ was and what he signified. Thus his post-Resurrection appearances to his discipies may have been, in a sense, apparitions of an extraordinarily magnetic and convincing kind. Pike accepts the Resurrection, interpreted this way, as evidence for his faith in eternal life. Like the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection may well be a mysterious event, understandable only to the eye of faith and not historically verifiable in the way that Jesus’ death on the cross can be authenticated. Nonetheless, theologians insist that the Resurrection has a profound, inexhaustible meaning for man. To Harvey Cox, for example, “the Resurrection points to the radically open character of human history. The unexpected can happen. There is a basis for hope. Life is full of surprise.”

Likewise, the Trinitarian formula, baldly stated, can be impervious to human comprehension, instead of being a meaningful mystery. But not many churchmen are prepared to toss it overboard entirely. The Rev. Lester Kinsolving, an Episcopal priest in California and a young follower of Pike’s, finds that “it’s logical to me—I say water, steam and ice.” Paul Tillich argued that the three-in-one concept was not a quantitative definition of God but a qualitative expression of the processes of divine life.

Karl Barth clarifies the concept in rolling dogmatics: “God is God in such a way that He is the Father, the Father of His Son, that He establishes Himself and through His own agency is God a second time. Established by Himself, not created by Himself—the Son is not created. But this relationship of Father and Son does not yet exhaust the reality, the nature of God. It is not that this establishing and being established of God threatens the unity of God. It is the Father and the Son together who clinch the unity of God a third time in the Holy Spirit.”

Christianity is not likely to survive by excessive literalism or by the idolization of outdated doctrinal formulas. The experience of church history is that every definition is a spiritual agony-man’s ever impossible attempt to capture infinite mystery in finite words. “Words strain,” as T. S. Eliot wrote, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

To argue, as Pike does, that truths anciently stated are no longer useful or necessary is to ignore the moving power that remains—sometimes dormant, sometimes just beneath the surface—in the dogmas, doctrines and beliefs that Christianity has built in its pilgrimage through history. It is not enough to demythologize and then throw away. “You can’t present content naked,” says Father John Dunne of Notre Dame. “It’s always in a form. Modern man loves myth as much as his ancestors. It’s just that OUF own myths are not as easy to see.” In the same way, it is too easy an answer to dismiss the Trinitarian formula as mere outdated symbol. “Never say only a symbol,” Paul Tillich perennially warned his pupils—and his life work is testimony to the importance of symbol to the human psyche and to the fact that the answers given by the Nazarene rabbi who died on the Cross can still help 20th century man explain himself to himself.

* Pike’s second. In 1938, he married Jane Alvies, a girl he had known at Hollywood High; they were divorced two years later. * Actually, the Koran says four.