Angry Prophet

By Mayo Mohs

GOD'S MAN by Duncan Norton-Taylor

Baker; 298 pages; $8.95

Martin Luther was the lightning of the Protestant Reformation; John Calvin was its thunder. John was only eight in 1517 when the 95 theses were nailed up on a Wittenberg church door. Within 30 years he would rise to succeed Luther as leader of the Reformation, codifying what the master often conveyed with rhetoric. Calvin's lifelong opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion, as he boasts in this vigorous biographical novel, grew to be as long as ''the Old Testament plus a good part of the New."

Those teachings soon overshadowed their God-struck author. John Knox carried Calvinism to Scotland, converting the rambunctious Catholic country with messages of doom. Puritan Jonathan Edwards shook the New World when he called the colonials "sinners in the hands of an angry God." Early in the 20th century, German Sociologist Max Weber found in Calvinism the seedbed of capitalism, a "Protestant ethic" that drove men to accumulate wealth as evidence of divine approval.

In God's Man, Author Duncan Norton-Taylor re-creates the person behind these layers of history and ideology. The reader follows young John as he journeys to Paris to study theology, then law, at the expense of the Roman Catholic Church. Reformation is in the air at the Sorbonne; the student undergoes a profound conversion. His new Protestantism is anathema to both church and state and he flees to Switzerland. In Geneva, Calvin becomes the voice of a new moral order; in one dispute he walks off the altar at Easter and is expelled from the city. Moving to Strasbourg, he ministers to French Protestant refugees, is married and waits for a summons back to Geneva.

But the recall of Calvin does not mean remorse among the Genevans. The city, despite its placid lakeshore site, is a grim spot enlivened mainly by nocturnal vices: gambling, drinking, whoring. In one notorious district there is a tavern for every three dwellings. Though he cherishes his own ration of wine (teetotaling comes later in Protestant history), the cleric inveighs against every excess. He condemns dancing as a prelude to fornication and finds Genevan feasting obscenely luxurious. (Among the new ordinances he demands is one limiting banquets to three courses of a mere four plates each.)

Calvin's dictates have personal consequences: his sister-in-law is banished for adultery, his stepdaughter jailed for fornication. "I have found it to be true," observes a friend, "that men who know what is best for society are unable to cope with their families." Some of Calvin's decisions have darker and more far-reaching echoes. Prefiguring Salem, he allows some 30 "witches" to be burned, drowned or hanged as scapegoats during an epidemic. And he becomes, like so many rebels, fiercely doctrinaire, letting the refugee heretic Michael Servetus go to the stake.

Ultimately. Norton-Taylor shows, it was ideas that ruled Calvin and those around him. In God's Man those ideas are given a human dimension. The reader encounters Calvin's doctrines and doubts tossed in a mind as agonized as his tubercular body. The godfather of capitalism assures a rich man that wealth is part of God's plan rather than a sin--but at the same time condemns gouging employers and supports strikes. In one fascinating intellectual exercise, Norton-Taylor offers his own version of a Calvin text, the reformer arguing with himself in verse about predestination: the doctrine that God has foreordained the salvation or damnation of each man from the beginning of time.

John Calvin died at 54, after a long and tormenting illness. The man who had sought to impose his will on the world had a peculiar last request: he wanted to be buried in an unmarked grave. The wish was respected. Today no one knows the great reformer's final resting place. But the book offers an epitaph: "He meant what he said." The reverse is true for this imaginative biography: Norton-Taylor performs the considerable task of saying what Calvin meant.

--Mayo Mohs

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