She is up to her gills in religion. And her religion is of course radical environmentalism. She worships at that altar, and wants all of us to do the same. For many people today who have thrown out the one true God, the vacuum is replaced by various substitutes. Hardcore green religion is one of them. We all need to live for something greater than ourselves, and if we reject the one who created us, then we run with cheap imitations.

Yes, I realise that honorary degrees are usually not worth the paper they are printed on, but in what has got to be the joke of the decade, climate alarmist Greta Thunberg is to be awarded an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Helsinki!
The 20 year old Swede has already been honoured with a doctorate by the Belgian University of Mons, and was named Time’s ‘person of the year’ in 2019. She is held up by many as our only hope. About the only accolade left is to proclaim her to be the long-awaited Messiah.
It seems to me that Thunberg does not have a theological bone in her body – certainly not any Christian ones. Yet here we have another woke university declaring that she might be Scandinavia’s greatest theologian – if not the world’s. Wow, not bad for a day’s work.
Theology, as I might need to remind some folks, is a word easily broken down. It has to do with the study of God. I am not sure what contributions young Greta has made to that field of study. None, I suspect. But now we must esteem her as some great mind – some great academic.
But as far as I know, she has not even finished a bachelor’s degree. And I am not sure how hot she was even in her high school studies. But none of that matters. In our PoMo world image triumphs over substance any day of the week. Never mind that she basically runs with a script spoon fed to her by her leftist parents. She is now to be bowed down to with her every word taken as gospel.
However, to insist that she is not some renown Christian theologian is NOT to say she is not religious. She is up to her gills in religion. And her religion is of course radical environmentalism. She worships at that altar, and wants all of us to do the same.
For many people today who have thrown out the one true God, the vacuum is replaced by various substitutes. Hardcore green religion is one of them. We all need to live for something greater than ourselves, and if we reject the one who created us, then we run with cheap imitations.
Worshipping Mother Earth or Gaia or Deep Green spirituality is one way to proceed. And this is not new: we have always been looking for alternative religions to embrace. Back in 1982 American sociologist Robert Nisbet (died 1996), remarked that environmentalism has become the third great redemptive movement in human history, following Christianity and Marxism. As he wrote in Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Harvard University Press):
From the Gospel of Capitalist Efficiency to the Gospel of Utopianism’ would serve very well as subtitle here. It is entirely possible that when the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism.
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Christian princes are not church officers, insisted Calvin, but they have “obtained” by God’s sovereign decree. Like David, they should be versed in God’s law in order to apply it justly throughout the nation, leaving the administration of the sacraments and preaching to those with ministerial callings. Calvin’s view resonated with many in Britain where history had prepared the soil for it to take root. Under Elizabeth I’s rule, a diverse array of church leaders echoed Calvin’s political theology including Puritans like Thomas Cartwright and Anglicans like John Jewel and Richard Hooker. 

Recently, a provocative quote from Michael Bird made the rounds through Christian Twitter. “The Bible has a technical term for someone who tries to combine religious and political power,” says Bird, “It’s called antichrist.”
It’s a punchy line, but interrogating it for a moment reveals new vistas of incoherence. It’s obviously appealing to evangelicals who want to countersignal their embarrassment of fellow believers seduced by the lure of Christian Nationalism. But as many pointed out in the replies, does the satisfaction of castigating your socio-political rivals require censuring the lot of Calvin, Luther, the Westminster Divines, Constantine, most English monarchs, and King David as antichrist?
Any sane person will say Bird’s opinion lacks nuance. But how many will admit it represents an ideological bias embedded in American Protestantism whose reckoning is long overdue?
Radical Secularism and American Protestantism
It’s ironic that mainstream evangelicals have come to equate piety with a notion of radical secularism championed by an atheist turned Unitarian. Most are aware that the primary source of modern commitments to secularism comes from Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association” of 1802. There, Jefferson explains that his intentions behind the Constitution’s First Amendment were to build “a wall of separation between Church and State.” More important for today, however, was the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Building on Jefferson’s wall imagery, they urged it to be “high and impregnable.”
There has since been a post-war consensus about the absolute separation between church and state whose proponents have grown among believers and unbelievers alike. Most concerningly, the former sound just as dogmatic as the latter. 
Examples include David French’s infamous defense of drag queen story hours as a “blessing of liberty” which civil authorities must allow by demand of the First Amendment’s commitment to moral neutrality and  Russell Moore’s criticism of Uganda’s new anti-homosexuality laws which, to him, represent a trading of gospel witness for political power.
Both cases argue for limiting the magistrate’s power to enforce Christian virtues although on slightly different terms. French, for example, mostly appeals to Jeffersonian principles and the inalienable right to religious liberty. He doesn’t need to cite specific Scripture since it’s clear he thinks his views are the right application of the Bible’s teaching. And he’s not alone. A.A. Hodge, the famous nineteenth-century American Presbyterian theologian and churchman, made a similar appeal to religious freedom in his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. 
Self-conscious of their desire to faithfully articulate the whole testimony of Scripture, the original authors of the Westminster Confession punctuated each doctrine with biblical citations. In James 4:12 and Romans 14:4, Hodge sees a right to conscience (WCF XX) which, when applied in the civil sphere (WCF XXIII), becomes an “inalienable prerogative of mankind…to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.” For Hodge, the magistrate’s duty to preserve religious freedom supersedes that of advancing Christian virtues. Add a bit of Frenchian proceduralism and it’s ready for the Sunday column, though Hodge would no doubt be horrified by some of the ways French applies this way of thinking today. 
If French takes a slightly indirect way of arriving at the absolute separation of church and state, Moore is more explicitly biblicist, rooting his case in hermeneutics which reveal important distinctions between Old and New Testament political realities. Conveniently for him, evangelical hermeneutics mandate a church-state arrangement amenable to everyone but conservative Christians while also making it easier to dismiss his opponents to the right as theocrats who simply misread their Bible.
Chad Van Dixhoorn represents the best version of his argument, addressing what he calls the “problematic” parallels between the duties of Israelite kings and today’s civil magistrates codified in the original Westminster Confession of Faith:
The problem with these parallels is that what is good for the old covenant people of God is not always good for the new. In the Old Testament, Israel was the assembly or church of God and God’s chosen nation. And so rulers in the nation also carried some responsibility for the church. In the New Testament the assembly or church of God is Israel, but there is no chosen political nation. The church is scattered among the nations. Neither is any ruler in any nation responsible for the church (Confessing the Faith, 314).
But as I have argued before, the implications of Christ’s new covenant were not lost on most early American Protestants. Most wanted a harmonious relationship between the civil and ecclesial spheres no less rooted in Scripture but arranged by robust systematic categories. 
A Mixed Metaphor
One historically popular image for conveying the entire biblical witness to the magistrate’s relationship with the church was that of a nursing father. The admittedly mixed metaphor comes from Isaiah 49:23, and it was Calvin’s penetrating commentary on that verse that established the religious duties of Protestant magistrates in their realm. Beyond an “ordinary profession of faith,” magistrates are to defend the church, promote the glory of God, maintain the purity of doctrine, curb idolatry, and, generally, “supply everything that is necessary for nourishing the offspring of the Church.”
Impossible to ignore in Calvin’s interpretation is a convenient polemic against papal supremacy, which he blames for improperly subordinating civil authority to the greed of the Roman Catholic Church.
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We can follow the example of those who have gone before us. This is how we can pray Psalm 137 today. We call on and plead with God to be faithful to his promises. And we know that all of God’s promises find their Yes and Amen in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). The exiles by the waters of Babylon appealed to God’s Word revealed in Scripture and we do the same today. And we have so much more – we have the Word himself who has revealed the glory of the Father (John 1).

Where were you on May 2, 2011? I was at an Usher concert with a few friends. It was a great concert, and I enjoyed hearing Usher perform several hits from his newest album, Raymond v. Raymond. The concert, though, is not the reason I remember that day. I remember May 2, 2011 because of what happened after the concert. As my friends and I left the venue, we noticed a lot of people excitedly looking at their phones. We assumed they were just reliving the concert we all just experienced. Until, that is, a pick-up truck with a huge American flag in the back drove by and a man shouted from the window, “Osama’s dead! We got him!” On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces, and people halfway around the world broke out in jubilant shouts.
What was behind that? How did the killing of a stranger thousands of miles away provoke joy and excitement in the parking lot of an Usher concert? To state it succinctly, celebration broke out in that parking lot because the death of bin Laden represented the satisfaction of a communal grief and rage that was occasioned by an act of true evil.
What about Psalm 137? How could a group of people unflinchingly state, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” and then have the audacity to write such a statement down? More to the point, how does a psalm that celebrates little ones dashed against rocks (Ps. 137:9) belong in the same Bible where Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14)? In Psalm 137, the Bible confronts our modern sensibilities and gives us significant pause. The goal of this article is not to sanitize the passage by reading it allegorically, nor is the goal to assert that this passage is an aberration from the biblical witness. Instead, a careful and faithful reading of Psalm 137 leads us to Christ and, in so doing, provides us with the means by which we can engage with evil and suffering in our world today.
The Bible is a strange book. It’s okay to admit that. Psalm 137 was likely written in the 6th century BC in ancient Hebrew. The cultural and historical setting in which Psalm 137 was expressed is far removed from the United States in 2021. And yet, Christians recognize that presiding over the cultural and personal diversity that led to the Bible is a sovereign, powerful, and single Author. When we encounter passages that highlight cultural distance, our first reaction ought to be a humble curiosity.
Where does Psalm 137 fit in the story of history? The first question a humble curiosity asks is one of context. Indeed, context will provide the key to understanding Psalm 137. Where does Psalm 137 sit in history, in the literary story, and in the redemptive story of Scripture? The historical setting of the psalm is apparent in the very first verse:
By the waters of Babylon,there we sat down and wept,when we remembered Zion.
Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, writes of Psalm 137 that, “This psalm was almost certainly composed shortly after the deportation of the Judahites by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.”[1] Psalm 137 is one of the few psalms which makes clear its own historical context. The psalmist writes of the community of exiles sitting down by the waters of Babylon to weep. The city of Babylon and the surrounding country was known at that time for its extensive system of canals. The Jewish exiles likely retreated to different places of this system in order to gather as a community and, as this psalm makes clear, give voice to their grief.
But why grief? These original Jewish singers of this psalm lived through the capture of Jerusalem, the looting and destruction of the Temple, and their forced exile to Babylon. 2 Kings 25 describes the siege of Jerusalem lasting for two years. The siege resulted in a famine so severe that it led to mothers boiling their children for food (Lam. 4:9-10). The king at that time, Zedekiah, was captured. The Babylonians killed his sons in front of him and then put his eyes out so that the last thing he ever saw was the murder of his sons. The Temple was looted and burned down, along with the palace and all the houses of Jerusalem.
Psalm 137, then, is a song of lament. It is a communal expression of grief, an opportunity for the Jewish people to gather and tell the truth of their oppression. Their lament is further occasioned, however, by a more immediate context. In the midst of their weeping, their Babylonian captors goad them on, “Sing us one of your Zion songs.” These Zion songs are scattered throughout the Psalter and scholars have identified several of them. One of them is Psalm 48, which opens with, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within her citadels God has made himself known as a fortress.”
Can you imagine the scene Psalm 137 depicts? The people of Judah are gathered along the canals of Babylon, lamenting the death and destruction visited upon them. And then, like taunting schoolboys, their captors jeer at them: “Sing us one of your songs! How about that one that says Zion is the city of the great king? The one that says God has made himself known as a fortress?” A hermeneutic of humble curiosity necessarily entails empathy, particularly since Christians are grafted into the story of Israel. The story of these Jewish exiles in the 6th century BC is our story. We weep with them.
Where does Psalm 137 fit in the literary story of Scripture? History is not the only important context we must examine. The Bible is a book written by one Author through many individual authors. Where does Psalm 137 fit within that picture? Here it is helpful to introduce the idea of a canonical reading of Scripture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became popular among scholars to attempt to trace the various sources of the Bible to disparate authors. Instead of recognizing the unity of Scripture, scholars sought to dissect Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. A professor of Old Testament at Yale University changed this with the introduction of the “canonical reading” of the Bible. Brevard Childs asserted that it was most helpful to approach the Bible as it is received by faith communities. In other words, rather than dissecting Scripture into many individual parts, Childs recognized the Bible as a united literary document which deserved study as such. A canonical reading of the Psalms, then, considers questions such as the arrangement of the psalms and how the book functions as a literary whole.
Scholars have generally identified five ‘books’ within the Psalms. Psalm 137 is located in Book V of the Psalter. This final section of the Psalter consists of Psalms 107-150. O. Palmer Robertson describes Book V as “the climactic praises of the consummation of the kingdom” (emphasis in original).[2] Interestingly, the Psalm itself sits within a trio of Psalms that serve as a hinge between two larger collections within the book. Psalms 120-134 are known collectively as the Songs of Ascent.
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