What Did Bishop Pike Really
Hear?
I HAD A BRIEF acquaintance with James A. Pike in 1950, soon after he became chaplain of Columbia University in New York.
Prior to this, Dr. Pike was Episcopal chaplain at Vassar College. In this capacity, he had brought Reverend Bryan Green, Anglican priest and former chaplain of Oxford University, to Vassar for some evangelistic meetings.
The results were hardly what either man expected. They were attacked in religion classes and in the student newspaper for daring to imply that being a Christian involves objective belief rather than mere attitude. "Why, Mohandas Gandhi is as good a Christian as Reverend Bryan Green" was one comment that represented a general response.
Like most campus upsets (even in the late forties, when they were less usual than they are today), this one would probably have quieted down if Dr. Pike had not given it greater exposure. This he did in The Living Church, a national Episcopal laymen's magazine.
Without naming the college, although his restraint accomplished little since Pike was known to be Episcopal student worker at Vassar, Dr. Pike described what had happened. He went into some detail, explaining, for instance, that this former
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Oxford chaplain had been called a "Holy Roller" at the college. Dr. Pike concluded by expressing surprise that parents in the church who would never think of sending their daughters to a school that had an unbalanced diet in the dining hall, didn't think twice about sending them away to a school with a thoroughly unbalanced religious diet in the classroom.
Instantly, on publication, Dr. Pike became persona non grata to the Vassar authorities. He left his post there, only to be offered the much more significant position of university chaplain and head of the religion department at Columbia. (This was shortly after Dwight D. Eisenhower became president of the university).
This was when I was introduced to him. (I was a Protestant student worker at the time, with responsibility for various colleges and universities in the East).
We had conversations about Christian doctrine. Dr. Pike told me about his own conversion from humanistic agnosticism to faith in Jesus Christ, through the Episcopal Church, while he was serving as a government lawyer in Washington.
"I can't show favoritism in my position here," he told me, "but I'd rather see you get through to students than a theologically liberal movement, because you're getting them related to God."
We discussed such doctrines as man's fallen condition, the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit. On these doctrines we were in close agreement with the biblical position.
Hearing the account of Dr. Pike's own conversion, and his doctrinal view, I had no doubt that
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we shared common faith and fellowship in Jesus Christ. Only recently since reading his book, The Other Side, have questions been raised in my mind by such a statement as this: "It is not unlike saying the Creed in church in order to go along with the congregation's corporate worship, even though one, if alone, might be unsure about affirming each individual item thereof."
But we fell apart on our view of the Bible. He could not accept the historic doctrine of its unique divine inspiration, its integrity and authority.
This casual but warm acquaintance flashed through my mind almost 20 years later, when I read that Bishop Pike reported that he had established communication with his dead son Jim.
I suppose my empathy with the Bishop was greater, and certainly my interest in what he reported was increased, by the fact that my own college-student son had also recently died quite suddenly.
Did Bishop Pike really talk with Jim, through mediums?
He certainly thought so, and the movement of objects in the unoccupied flat he had shared with his son in Cambridge, England, the recollection of past events and people through mediums, would seem to support his view. (The full account is found in The Other Side, by James A. Pike and Diane Kennedy, Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York.)
The first medium to call up Jim from the dead — and the final one, as related in Dr. Pike's book — was Mrs. Ena Twigg, an Anglican churchwoman who lived in West London. Her word about Jim, or Jim's word through her, was, "I failed the test,
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I can't face you, can't face life. I'm confused. Very sudden passing — have had to do this — couldn't find anyone. God, I didn't know what I was doing. But when I got here I found I wasn't such a failure as I thought. My nervous system failed .... I'm not in purgatory — but something like hell here. Yet nobody blames me here."
At a later session with Mrs. Twigg, Dr. Pike explored these "brief theological comments," and asked Jim if he had "any new insight."
"Yes," Jim replied (through the medium). "Now I feel there is Something. It's beginning to make sense to assume that Someone is making things hang together and develop... but since I've been here I haven't heard anything about a Jesus."
Some months later, Mrs. Twigg's trance produced these words from Jim: "This was religion without somebody forcing God and Jesus down my throat ... I haven't met [Jesus]. They talk about him — mystic, a seer, yes, a seer. Oh, but Dad, they don't talk about him as a savior. As an example, you see? ... Don't you even believe that God can be personalized. He is the Central Force and you all give your quota toward it. Do you agree with me, Dad?"
Reverend George Daisley, who had come to Santa Barbara, California, from England about five years before, was the next medium with whom Dr. Pike had contact. Edgar Cayce, Dr. Pike's Uncle Bill, his son's maternal grandfather, and Jim himself were raised by Mr. Daisley during his initial seance.
In a later sitting, George Daisley quoted Jim:
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"I haven't heard anything personally about Jesus. Nobody around me seems to talk about him. When we come over here, we have a choice: to remain as we are, or to grow in our understanding. Some still seem to be Church-minded and are waiting for a Judgment Day, but these seem to be the unenlightened ones. Others seem to be expanding their mind and self toward more Eastern understandings. I have talked to someone of Chinese origin who offered to help me. He said, 'All of life is a process of evolution and growth.' It seems that the more the intellect is used, the better — but we're dealing with a 'mind self' which we are fusing with the 'spirit self.' They tell me it will take much endeavor to find the truth.
"A man came to earth who was Jesus, I am sure, and I would assume he came from the sphere where the purified are. I am in the sphere where those who've made mistakes are, but there seems to be no reason why at some period of eternity we can't all be a part of what some call the 'Christ sphere.' "
The other medium through whom Dr. Pike believed he spoke with his son was Reverend Arthur Ford, a Disciples of Christ minister in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, perhaps the best-known American medium. It was a videotaped seance with Mr. Ford in Toronto, subsequently released on the Canadian Television Network, that alerted the world to Dr. Pike's belief that he had been in communication with his dead son.
In a subsequent seance, Mr. Ford quoted Mrs. Maren Bergrud, Dr. Pike's secretary-assistant (who, after collaborating with him from the beginning
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of his research into psychic phenomena through mediums, had recently committed suicide) as saying from "the other side": "[Jesus is] just another person, been here longer, but I have been told that the people who have been here long enough to advance to a high plane or a high dimension can always come down to a lower plane to help us. But we who are just here have to earn the right to go up."
