Claims

Rene Girard argued that atheists and fundamentalists disagree on secondary questions (whether God exists) but agree on the more important question that violence is an attribute of God—atheists don't believe God exists but still don't attribute dangerous violence-capability to humans, instead placing it on God or denying it is possible

While it is possible to read biblical history as too progressive (falling into Marcion or Marxism), reading it as entirely rooted in the Old Testament is also wrong. The balance is required: genuine novelty occurs through history while remaining grounded in prior revelation

Seed-bearing plants in Genesis 3 represent the way identity persists through variation: the seed is the identity (how you recognize what kind of plant it is), and the vegetation is the multiplicity/variation—God commands not just plants but seed-bearing plants to show that stability requires both identity and the capacity to reproduce that identity through variation.

The hierarchical ordering of creatures in Genesis (livestock, wild animals, crawling things) represents a hierarchy of meaning, identification, and participation in intelligence: livestock are close to human intelligence and society; wild animals are chaotic and unknown; crawling things live underground in darkness—this hierarchy expresses degrees of proximity to intelligible pattern.

In the Christian New Testament tradition, logos means 'word' (as in 'In the beginning was the Word'), not free rationality—the primary reality is the authoritative, fundamental, divine word of God; this difference in meaning has been the source of endless confusion in Western philosophy between devotees of Athens and Jerusalem.