One of the most tragic examples of contemporary liberal theology is provided by Bishop James Pike, whose theological deterioration has carried him farther and farther left since he entered Protestantism at the point of an unstable Barthian commitment. At the time his book What Is This Treasure was published in 1966, he had already come to display utter arbitrariness in accepting and rejecting biblical materials in accord with his personal religious preferences. In articles on his theology published that year in the Sunday School Times (April 30 and May 7), I remarked:
“If we can trust no revelation of God fully, then we ourselves become the only remaining standard of judgment. This is precisely the case with the Bishop of California, and the arbitrariness of his entire theology is the consequence. He picks and chooses Scripture according to his interests. Thus, as we have seen, he accepts the first clause of John 14:6 while rejecting the second, and uses the apocryphal book of Judith to argue for a loose sexual morality, while rejecting the absoluteness of the Ten Commandments found in canonical Scripture. In ‘How My Mind Has Changed,’ he insists on wine for Communion on the ground that ‘Jesus never drank grape juice,’ yet in What Is This Treasure he approvingly cites the non-Christian philosopher Porphyry (third century), who said of Jesus’ healing of the Gadarene demoniac, ‘probably fictitious, but if genuine then morally discreditable’ (p. 69). In A Time For Christian Candor he rejects Hebrews 12:5, 6 as ‘in direct contradiction to our Lord’s teaching’ (p. 136).
“The more one reads the Bishop, the more the conviction grows that in dispensing with all ‘earthen vessels,’ he has inevitably ended up with the earthen vessel of his own judgment.…”
Now, with the appearance of Pike’s If This Be Heresy and the reports of the Ford-Pike séances, the evident decline has proceeded even farther. In sublime disregard of the basic Christian affirmations concerning sin, hell, judgment, redemption, and resurrection, the bishop endeavors to provide “empirical” evidence for human survival after death by way of psychic phenomena and psi-research. As in the eighteenth century, when alongside a Voltaire stood a Cagliostro, rationalism has shown its other face, superstition.
By “superstition” we do not mean ESP investigations as such, for this is a legitimate field of inquiry; nor do we criticize the bishop’s laudable appreciation of empirical method. What is sad is the extent to which he, like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of the Bible, consistently confuse empirical investigation with unrecognized metaphysical and religious commitments.
The data collected by parapsychological experts over the years have been exceedingly impressive; only prejudicial blindness can ignore research compilations such as those by Sidgwick, Gurney, Myers, and Tyrrell, or the work carried on by Professor Rhine. But one cannot stress too emphatically that the specialists in this area have not been able to establish human survival or any other religious doctrine on the basis of their data.
Thus, after setting out the best evidence the ESP field offers, Gardner Murphy—by all odds one of the foremost American students in this field—gives this chilling personal testimony: “Trained as a psychologist, and now in my sixties, I do not actually anticipate finding myself in existence after physical death” (Challenge of Psychical Research [1961], p. 273). And in concluding a detailed examination of the entire parapsychological field, Castellan (La Métapsychique [2e éd., 1960]) quotes another French expert, Robert Amadou, and perceptively comments on his judgment:
“There is an immense lag between the exact knowledge that we have of paranormal phenomena and the interpretive suppositions implied by our hypotheses.… We are too ignorant of the circumstances surrounding the appearance of psi facts to be able to build a satisfactory theory of these phenomena—a theory immediately verifiable by experience.” The truth of this remark is confirmed at the end of our study as well. The genuine parapsychologists have been unable to provide any scientific explanatory scheme: every one of their conclusions manifestly bears the imprint of metaphysics.
This is the point: Pike’s own metaphysic—and, in light of the close connection established by Jung between psi phenomena and the unconscious, doubtless his personal drive toward wish-fulfillment as well—creates the “survival” interpretation he places on psychic data. Why not other contexts of interpretation? In the Christian worldview, there are other spiritual powers to be reckoned with besides God and the members of the Church Triumphant (cf. E. L. Mascall’s The Angels of Light and the Powers of Darkness [1954]. Wrote B. Vaughan in his foreword to a classic work by a noted British psychical investigator: “There is a great deal to say against Spiritism, but not much that I know of for it. But I shall be reminded that it has disproved the doctrine for materialism and proved the immortality of man. Not so; it may have only proved the immortality of demons” [The Menace of Spiritualism, by Elliot O’Donnell (1920)].
This sobering point is reinforced by the most important German theological work published on the subject in this century: Kurt Koch’s Seelsorge und Okkultismus (5. Aufl., mit Geleitworte von Adolf Koeberle [1959]), where the author scientifically tabulates the “frequency-ratio” of consequences connected with spiritualist activity on the part of practitioners (such as mediums) and followers; these include psychoses, horrible death-bed scenes, suicides, apoplexy, warping and distortion of character, compulsions and fear-delusions, indifference or positive hostility to Scripture and prayer, and obduracy (Verkrampfung) against Christ and God.
“Test the spirits” cautions the Christian revelation, but for Bishop Pike and the radical theology of the sixties, testing of theological judgments has become impossible. If the November 13, 1967, issue of Newsweek is right that “anything goes” in our “permissive society” today, then theology has become relevant beyond the wildest dreams of its current proponents: now “anything goes” religiously as well.
Can this devolution be halted? Only if the true standard of theological and ecclesiastical judgment is recovered—the standard by which all bishops and theologians, all clergy and laity, are to be judged. Luther well identified this criterion; may his prayer be ours: “Lord, keep us steadfast in Thy Word!”
