In this piece I reflect on DCI John Luther’s “overriding need to protect other people from injustice and harm, and even sometimes the consequences of their own sin and guilt,” and how that fits in with the Christian (and particularly Lutheran) doctrine of vocation.
Indeed, the character’s name itself is instructive in this regard. DCI John Luther (played by Idris Elba) is a kind of present-day embodiment of the ideas present in the popular book On Secular Authority, which contains works by the reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther on the restraining power of the civil magistrate.
As I write,
John Luther is a deeply troubled man. We get no real insight into his spiritual life, and he begins the second series of episodes on the verge of suicide. There is likewise little overt religiosity in Luther. But in the vicarious representative action of the natural lawman DCI John Luther on behalf of others, we see a broken and fragmentary expression of common grace, God’s preserving work in the world.
In this way, as a force for civil justice and the restraint of evil, DCI John Luther might just be on God’s side without knowing it.