Richard Muller, and the uses of tradition accounts/genealogies in theology

I have finally started reading Richard Muller's The Unaccommodated Calvin. And a scholarly work with a more authoritative tone I have yet discovered. Muller knows his stuff, and knows he knows his stuff. In a nutshell, his thesis is that Calvin needs to be understood in his own context and on his own terms, and that this yields a more complicated picture than the one we usually get. Calvin must not be accomodated to any latter-day matrix or theological system, whether Barthian or even 'Calvinist'. Furthermore, you cannot see him as utterly divorced from the intellectual context that preceeded him, even when he differed from it. And again: you can't conclude from a simple reading of the later edition of the Institutes that 'Calvin's doctrine of XYZ was...'. His writings are more complex and variegated than that. He showed more development and more subtlety.

So, is it possible to learn from Calvin, or indeed any figure from history, without the historian always blowing the whistle? Muller concludes, nicely that

A clever theologian can accomodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian - and a good historian - will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him. p. 188

But I want to know: how? Given all the caveats that Muller has laid down, is there any way of accessing Calvin for today? How would he have us do this?

Whch leads me to a methodological point. It is standard practice in theological (and some philosophical) thinking to give an account of the tradition in which you stand, and also to show how you are correcting a tradition that went wrong at point X with thinker Y. It's a rhetorically powerful move, of course. Theology does this much more than other disciplines, because it believes in continuity as essential: even Luther and Calvin were at pains to show that they were not merely innovators, for example. And yet, this is a process that is evidently fraught with danger. We can give a wry smile now at the neo-orthodox accounts of 'Calvin against the Calvinists', for example, which have been proven to be simplistic. John Milbank has been taken to task for his sloppy readings of Dun Scotus (Milbank cites Scotus as the point at which theology got it all wrong and it has been downhill ever since).

But, under Muller's method, is such a process even possible? Is it possible to narrate the tradition in the way that theologians of all colours do as a matter of course?