The subfield of intellectual history has derived much of its vitality in the last thirty years from theological history, largely because of the latter’s focus upon continuity or discontinuity of thought in the search for orthodoxy. Yet recent methodological innovations upon reception history allow that subfield to give back, mainly in the way of theological retrieval. Beginning with Caroline Winterer’s American Enlightenments (2016), and more recently with Gloria Lui’s Adam Smith’s America (2022) and Claire Rydell Arcenas’s America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life (2022), the new reception history asks not how ideas are received as much as they are remade to fit present purposes. That is, something within American intellectual life required a vision of a unified Enlightenment or a certain picture and elevated status of Adam Smith or John Locke, much beyond what they actual represent historically. Although the new history questions at times whether we can access those events or figures, a focus upon the nature of reception considered as reinvention frees up the past, as Daniel Wickberg argues, to be investigated anew without having to go through such caricatures. I propose a paper that, taking its cue from these recent developments within intellectual history, explores an exciting new method for the study Church History, one that lends itself well to theological retrieval.