Pike Derogates Archaic Dogmas

"I can no longer believe that which is not based on data and experience," the Rt. Rev. James A. Pike said last night in Sanders Theatre.

The controversial Episcopal theologian, who is awaiting trial on charges of heresy, made a rambling speech emphasizing "the triumph of the empirical method" and the decline of faith based only on authority's say-so.

Pike made sallies against subjects from birth control (don't play "Vatican roulette (the rhythm method), see your doctor,") to the Church doctrine that Christ's mother was' a virgin ("Jesus wasn't prefab").

On LSD he said, "Hearing about people's trips is like hearing about their operations." He called the drug "instant Zen," saying that some of the insights people get on trips are familiar to students of mysticism. But taking LSD is a dangerous way to achieve insights, he said.

Pike said we must dispose of the "intellectually intolerable" stand of the "God Is Dead" theologians. "If God isn't now, He wasn't; if He was, He is."

Pike explained his inability to accept traditional dogma. For example, he said, the doctrine of the Trinity is not even mentioned in the Bible -- which he called a "mishmash." The doctrine was thought up by a group of early Greek bishops, and we are asked to believe it on the Church's authority, he said. Moreover, if the doctrine of Christ's descent into hell were part of some primitive religion, he said, we would call it nonsense.

Because people today have a scientific attitude and refuse to accept arbitrary statements unquestioningly -- whether from the Supreme Court or the Pope -- the Church is falling into decline, Pike said. "You like the guy who says what you like to hear. When authority goes it goes. You never, never, never get it back. Never!"

Pike said he believes that the universe hangs together and that there is "a unus -- not a unum--, a unifying, constellating reality, a transcendence which bears all interpersonal experience." He said there is a style of life that verifies itself -- a free, other directed existence epitomized in the lives of such people as Jesus Christ and Jim Reeb, a civil rights worker murdered in Selma, Alabama, in 1965