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Despite frequent rumors of heavy drinking and womanizing, his name was put forth and approved by the diocese of Northern California to become their bishop. By then Pike needed to mount a full-scale campaign in the house of bishops to get the post. (One issue, which had dogged him before, was the dubious means by which he had obtained an annulment of his first marriage, after it ended in divorce in 1941, in order to remarry in 1942). Ultimately he succeeded. As bishop at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Pike added apostolic authority to his arsenal and put it to use. He became a one-man ecumenical force by recognizing a Methodist minister as having dual ordination and freedom to serve in the diocese. Later he ordained a woman as a first-order deacon, the preliminary step before full pastoral ordination in the church (which was not approved until after Pike's death).

But in San Francisco, at the peak of his fame and influence, his life began to unravel. Though he eventually sobered up through AA, his second wife filed for separation in 1965 (and for divorce in 1966). Soon Pike was openly living with another woman, who later committed suicide after a fight with him. Growing more radical, Pike now actively argued against the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, and the Incarnation. Heresy procedures were begun in 1962, '64, '65, and '66, growing in intensity, but each time the church decided it was not in the denomination's best interest to pursue a heresy trial. The church's reluctance to try the openly heretical Pike demonstrates the demise of this instrument of denominational adjudication.

Pike stepped down as bishop of Northern California in 1966, the same year his son committed suicide. This led to his explorations of séances as a means of talking to his son. Pike was becoming an embarrassment to the church. After the death of his lover, he partnered with Diane Kennedy, a woman he had already been sleeping with, who was 29 when the 55-year-old Pike first hooked up with her. When his marriage to her in December 1968 led to church discipline—once again, one of the issues at stake was the means by which he arranged an annulment, in this case of his second marriage—he broke with his denomination entirely, claiming that the church was hopelessly out of date.

Pike and his new wife found a warrant for their position in a line from an Essene text translated from the Dead Sea Scrolls: "This is the time for the clearing of the way into the wilderness." As Robertson observes, "This declaration by 1969 had become a personal rallying cry for the couple as they disassociated themselves from institutional religion and a conventional livelihood, and proposed to study in Israel a historical Jesus far different from the accepted view of most of Christianity." In April of 1969, while Pike and his wife were driving to Qumran, they got lost and their car became stuck in the dirt. After ten hours of walking, Diane made it out. Five days later the bishop's body was found.

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48