church, don't bank on cathedrals and don't get rupted

link

It's no secret Coldplay's been influenced by U2.
Chris Martin has been upfront about that.
It's common knowledge.

It's even common fodder for satirical articles and reviews to even suggest
Chris Martin wants to be Bono.


..so there is little chance the lyric

"When the banks became cathedrals,"

in Coldplay's "Violet

Hill," was NOT inspired by the line

"The banks, they're like cathedrals"

in U2's "Playboy

Mansion."


That line itself was U2 quoting earlier U2:

"A man builds a city with banks and cathedrals"
(from "Lemon").



All that to say..
 the connection between the two institutions are compelling
                      (In a delightful irony, our church once met in a  building housing a bank)
and considering my taste in music, it's no surprise it's a common connection and thread in my mind.

Are banks the new cathedrals?

It definitely fits the scene today; maybe especially in the current economic downturn.



I just heard on the news that there is a huge surge in sales of safes for homes,
as folks aren't trusting banks nowadays.

Maybe the bankruptcy of the cathedral model
(at least as some mean it, see this, and "Es una mentira como una catedral.")

leads to the (literal) bankruptcy of (literal) banks,
and that has driven us to trust our home as sacred,  (home/house can't be "rupted,"...and as Wolfgang says, such a  spirit and structure is  persecution-proof

We're home again.

cathedrals>banks>home.


Maybe it's:

"Hmmm...First cathedrals started going under,
now banks are,
so let's get back home to basics:
home."

Wolfgang Simson again:

The historic Orthodox and Catholic Church after Constantine in the fourth century developed and adopted a religious system based on two elements: a Christian version of the Old Testament temple - the cathedral - and a worship pattern styled after the Jewish synagogue. They thus adopted, as the foundational pattern for the times to follow, a blueprint for Christian meetings and worship which was neither expressly revealed nor ever endorsed by God in New Testament times: the "cathegogue", linking the house- of-God mentality and the synagogue. Baptized with Greek pagan philosophy, separating the sacred from the secular, the cathegogue system developed into the Black Hole of Christianity, swallowing most of its society-transforming energies and inducing the church to become absorbed with itself for centuries to come. The Roman Catholic Church went on to canonize the system. Luther reformed the content of the gospel, but left the outer forms of " church" remarkably untouched. The Free Churches freed the system from the State, the Baptists then baptized it, the Quakers dry-cleaned it, the Salvation Army put it in uniform, the Pentecostals anointed it and the Charismatics renewed it, but until today nobody has really changed the system. The time to do that has now arrived.

.....Where is the easiest place, say, for a man to be spiritual? Maybe again, is it hiding behind a big pulpit, dressed up in holy robes, preaching holy words to a faceless crowd and then disappearing into an office? And what is the most difficult, and therefore most meaningful, place for a man to be spiritual?
At home..
link

And the economic collapse may even be a blessing in disguise;
(see "The Upside of Downward Mobility" by Matt Miller and
these posts by Len Hjalmarson),

if we can redeem and drop the Fresno Drop..

if we can get the church to be more home-based,

and from there, into the world.

We need to plant churches in homely homes
(as long as they don't become banks)
in bars and Barnes and Nobles
(as long as they don't become cathedrals)
even in literal banks and literal cathedrals..
(as long as we both shall live).

--
see also:

sex in elevators (in church)