The Death of Bishop James Pike occupies a strange, doubled place in E. L. Doctorow's City of God: it is at once a biographical anecdote about a real, notorious churchman and a prophetic template for the novel's central character, Thomas Pemberton. Pike, the bishop of California, is invoked repeatedly as the embodiment of a certain kind of 1960s Episcopal radicalism—a man who said all the evidence and theological common sense suggested Joseph was the biological father of Jesus, who could not accept the doctrine of the Trinity on the grounds that it verged on tritheism, who had trouble with the Second Coming, and who insisted none of this made him a bad priest or weakened his faith. His death in the desert, searching for the historical Jesus with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand, becomes the novel's recurring image of a faith that has stripped away doctrine to pursue the man himself, and it haunts Pem as he contemplates his own conversion and his own possible end.

Pike as the Model of Radical Doubt

The novel's narrator, Everett, first raises Pike after a conversation with Pem's bishop, who apparently reads Pem as a kind of 'son of Pike.' When Everett brings the subject up, Pem grows irritable, acknowledging that this is his bishop's read on him but pushing back against the comparison. He concedes that Pike was gutsy, liberal as hell, a breath of fresh air, but also calls him 'a bit of a lightweight.' The specific charge is personal: when Pike's son died of an overdose, Pike went to a medium who summoned up the son for a chat. The medium was Arthur Ford, a studious spiritualist who did his homework and kept files on people, including a thick file on the Pike family. Pem's verdict is harsh—'Spiritualism is the dementia of the religious mind'—yet the very vehemence of the dismissal suggests how close the comparison cuts. Pike's willingness to seek his dead son through a medium mirrors Pem's own grief-stricken wrestling with theodicy, and his rejection of the Trinity as tritheism prefigures Pem's own dismantling of Christian doctrine.

The Death in the Desert

The circumstances of Pike's death are recounted twice, each time with the same stark, almost absurdist detail. He went off to the desert in Israel looking for the historical Jesus, with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand. The image is deliberately incongruous—the sacred quest and the mundane consumer product—and it becomes a kind of shorthand for the novel's view of Pike as a man who loved Jesus the man but found the accumulated doctrine simply not credible. In a later, more extended recollection, Pem expands on this: Pike knew the accumulated doctrine was 'fantasy,' 'historically accumulated bullshit,' but he adored Jesus the man and wanted to find the real Jesus. He quit the church—'he never lacked for guts, he unfrocked himself'—and took the trip to the Holy Land. The death itself is described as wandering out and dying of heat prostration, a fate that Everett explicitly connects to Pem's own possible future when he asks whether Pem, now an experienced traveler, plans to quit and go to the Holy Land like Pike, 'wander out there and die of heat prostration.' Pem's reply—'Maybe. It cheers me to talk with you, Everett'—leaves the question open, suggesting that Pike's fate is not merely a historical curiosity but a live possibility for Pem himself.

The Cross and the Question of Sacrifice

Pike's story resonates with the novel's central symbol, the brass cross of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, which is stolen and later found lying flat on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, tarnished and shining in the autumn sun. The theft itself is framed by a detective's cynical assessment that the cross has no street value—'the book value for your cross has got to be zilch. Nada'—while a Torah would bring a minimum of five thousand dollars. The cross, in other words, is worthless as an object but priceless as a symbol, and its displacement from the church to the synagogue roof enacts the very questioning of Christian atonement that Pike embodied. Pem's own theological reflections, delivered in his remarks to the bishop's examiners, take up the idea of sacrifice through the image of the lizard who leaves his tail in the mouth of the predator and the fox who chews off his foot to escape the trap—'You give up a part to save the whole.' This programmed biological response is offered as the origin of the idea of sacrifice, and it stands in sharp contrast to the Christian doctrine of atonement that Pike rejected and that Pem is in the process of abandoning.

Pike's Shadow over Pem's Conversion

Pike's death haunts Pem's trajectory toward Judaism. When Pem delivers his wedding prayer at his marriage to Sarah Blumenthal, he speaks of his 'final act as a Christian and an ex–Christian priest' and addresses God in 'one of our intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills,' a deliberately deflationary account of prayer that echoes Pike's own irreverence toward received forms. The prayer goes on to indict God for allowing the genocidal cruelties of the century, declaring that 'the relentless and unimaginable genocidal cruelties shuddering across the world in our age have brought You into disrepute' and that 'You are part of the problem.' This is the theological position Pike's death dramatized—a man who could not accept the doctrine but could not stop loving the man—pushed to its logical conclusion. Where Pike died seeking the historical Jesus, Pem chooses a different path: he will become a Jew, finding 'the joy of a hallowed life' not in the desert but in the embrace of Sarah and her congregation. Yet the question Everett poses—whether Pem's conversion has more to do with wanting to marry Sarah than with theology—remains unanswered, and Pike's shadow falls over the wedding celebration as a reminder of the alternative fate Pem has narrowly avoided.

The Significance of Pike's Death in the Novel's Structure

Pike's death functions as one of the novel's many 'unremarked' divine signs—a life that, in its very failure, illuminates the central character's choices. The novel is structured around a series of performances and rituals—sermons, jazz quartet renditions, the wedding ceremony—and Pike's death is itself a kind of failed performance, a quest that ends not in revelation but in heat prostration. His story is told and retold, each retelling sharpening its significance: first as a biographical curiosity, then as a cautionary tale, then as a live possibility for Pem. The Coca-Cola bottle, the medium Arthur Ford, the unfrocking, the desert—these details accumulate into a portrait of a man who took the logic of Protestant doubt to its extreme, and whose end serves as both a warning and a strange inspiration for Pem's own more moderate, more communal resolution. In the end, Pike's death is the novel's most pointed example of what happens when faith becomes purely individual, stripped of tradition and community—a fate Pem avoids by choosing Sarah, the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, and the mikvah, even as he carries Pike's restless spirit within him.