In the process, Barr exposes other foibles of more recent efforts to maintain that tradition of interpretation: a tendency toward
specialization in historical and linguistic cognate fields that
avoids theological issues and ironically reduces them to matters archaeological and historical; a style of «maximal conservativism» that approximates
earlier positions taken on dogmatic grounds by a current process of selectively appropriating the most conservative elements of a variety of more critical positions; a surprising (and again ironic) tendency to offer «naturalistic» reinterpretations of the miraculous within the highly supernaturalistic inerrancy framework; and so on.