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By 1949, Pike was at Columbia as university chaplain and head of a religion department that had no courses. When he left three years later to become dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the department had Paul Tillich as an adjunct professor and a full complement of 32 courses. At St. John's, Pike became a celebrity and regularly drew thousands to his glib Sunday sermons. Although his belief remained "smooth orthodoxy" (he helped write an Episcopal doctrinal handbook that is still in use), he gradually became an outspoken social activist. When he rejected a degree in "white divinity," as he put it, from the segregated Sewanee School of Theology, the Episcopal trustees belatedly desegregated the school. His early concern for civil rights was one of the forces that helped shape the Episcopal liberalism so apparent in the church's convention last week.
In 1958 Pike was consecrated Bishop of California, moved to San Francisco's long-uncompleted Grace Cathedral, and soon raised funds to finish it. It was in Grace, at Pike's invitation, that Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake first proposed the Protestant unification plan that has since become the nine-church Consultation on Church Union.
What may well have been Pike's most important legacy to his church, paradoxically, was the result of his "heresy." He had started publicly to drift away from orthodox Episcopal interpretations in 1960, and by 1964 had gall enough to use the pulpit of Manhattan's revered Trinity Church to call the doctrine of the Trinity "excess baggage." Calling for "more belief, fewer beliefs," he was willing to trim down the Credo in favor of a few basic truths: the importance of imitating Christ, for instance, as "the man for others." Often accused of heresy by fellow clerics, Pike narrowly escaped a trial in the House of Bishops in 1966. As a result of the 1966 effort, a study group headed by Bishop Stephen F. Bayne virtually threw the entire concept of heresy out of the Episcopal Church.
Toward the end, Pike had retreated from the church. In 1966 he resigned as Bishop of California and became a fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in California. A squabble over his 1967 divorce and remarriage last year put him at odds with his friend, Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, who had succeeded him in San Francisco. Finally, he and his third wife, Diane, declared that they were leaving the church—"a dying institution"—altogether. In Santa Barbara they established a Foundation for Religious Transition for others who were leaving organized religion. Yet the church he had repudiated still carried Pike's name on the roster of its House of Bishops at last week's convention—which, even in disappearance, he once again upstaged.