Dualist Apocalyptic?

Ryan Leif Hansen doesn’t think it’s accurate to say that apocalyptic depictions of evil are “dualistic” (Silence and Praise). At the very least, the kind of dualism needs to be specified.

Hansen writes, “evil is the result of a resistance to divine rule and order, and a transgressing of divinely instituted boundaries throughout the cosmos. Evil is, therefore, not a problem strewn randomly through God’s cosmos, but exists as an alternative order, corrupting the goodness of God’s entire creation.”

It is true that for apocalyptic writers, evil is never “merely a historico-political problem, but a cosmic one, the rectification of which lies outside the boundaries of mundane causality and instrumentalities.” He cites Amos Wilder’s suggestion that “all true apocalyptic as conveying a sense of ‘anomie’ or loss of structure that calls everything into question for an audience. The language appropriate to the revealed vision can no longer rely on familiar assumptions or categories, but must express a reality based on portent and symbol, its language functioning as ‘non-language’ and its rhetoric working by ‘enormity or paradox.’” There is a rupture in one’s sense of space.

But he insists that the rupture doesn’t reflect a metaphysical dualism that denigrates matter: “The apocalyptic stance toward the created order is not as negative as some popular construals would have it. What is more often the case is that the cosmic space shares the curse on account of the fall of humanity, rather than falling under the curse itself.” In fact, “the evidence is far from unanimous about duality and the destruction of the cosmos in Apocalyptic thought. It is fair to say that the spatial rupture of apocalyptic is not necessarily dualistic and doesn’t necessarily mean the catastrophic end of the material world.” 

Overall, the problem of evil is that that space or matter is corrupt in itself but rather that “cosmic space is corrupted and compromised because of what has been done to it, because of the reign to which it has been subjected.”