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Seeking in this way to absorb and teach a living faith, the Pietists added a new discipline to the theological curriculum. In a real sense, they invented Christian history. Not that histories of the church hadn't been written before—but they were the first to give history and biography status as theological disciplines.

Why did the Pietists do this? Quite simply, they discovered that when you turn from theological treatises to church history, you begin to see how theory has become practice in the lives of real people. Then when you return to do theology, you have gained a new angle on the task.

You see, a radical surgery had been performed on church practice a century before the Pietists arrived on the scene: Luther and his fellow Reformers had thrown out the celebration of Saints' Days—and therefore the study and emulation of the saints' lives. This had solved some real abuses: beseeching saints to intercede as mediators between the believer and Christ, drawing on their supposed "bank" of accumulated merits, nearly worshiping them.

But so many exemplary figures were lost to the generations of Protestants that followed: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Clare—hundreds and thousands of others.

Were these people plaster saints—super-Christians who lived their whole lives surfing the clouds, drop-kicking demons, and laughing at temptation? No, they were just human beings.

And that's exactly what had made them such powerful lessons for the medieval Christians: ordinary believers could look at the saints' lives and see people who had their own flaws—who made mistakes, got cranky, had bad days. … And yet by God's grace these saints did remarkable things—they lived their theology in remarkable ways.

So, looking at their stories, any person, however lowly, would know that it is possible to be changed by grace and be used in great ways in the kingdom. You would know that the kind of life you are currently living is not the only possible kind—that there is this luminous possibility of Christlikeness available to all.

By making church history a respected theological discipline, the Pietists recaptured this tradition of learning about and being inspired by the "great cloud of witnesses" who have gone before us.

So if we take the Pietists' cue and read church history to learn lessons about living theology, what will we find?

Before I came to Bethel, I spent most of three years as managing editor of Christian History & Biography magazine. For me, every new issue was a revelation of what happens when theology comes alive.

When I started working on my very first issue, Issue 76: The Christian Face of the Scientific Revolution, I had a vague sense that Christianity and science had always been at odds with each other. "Everyone knew," for example, that the church had stomped on Galileo Galilei when he took Copernicus's theory and ran with it. But I soon discovered that this "warfare model" of the relationship between theology and science was anything but true. I learned from scientists like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton that when we let God guide us in our secular vocations, amazing things happen.

During the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, countless scientists both famous and unknown had engaged in the passionate pursuit of scientific knowledge precisely out of theological motives. They believed God is the creator and lover of the world. And they wanted to know more about this wondrous, beloved creation. The warfare of science and theology? Hardly. One Christian scientific innovator after another* made theology come alive as they pursued their scientific vocations. And the results have changed the world.

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