Religion & Liberty Online

DCI John Luther: Secular Authority

John Luther is pierced for Jenny's transgressions.
An essay of mine on the wonderful and difficult BBC series “Luther” is up over at the Comment magazine website, “Get Your Hands Dirty: The Vocational Theology of Luther.”

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.

Jordan J. Ballor

Jordan J. Ballor (Dr. theol., University of Zurich; Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is director of research at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, an initiative of the First Liberty Institute. He has previously held research positions at the Acton Institute and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and has authored multiple books, including a forthcoming introduction to the public theology of Abraham Kuyper. Working with Lexham Press, he served as a general editor for the 12 volume Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology series, and his research can be found in publications including Journal of Markets & Morality, Journal of Religion, Scottish Journal of Theology, Reformation & Renaissance Review, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Faith & Economics, and Calvin Theological Journal. He is also associate director of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research at Calvin Theological Seminary and the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity & Politics at Calvin University.