162 Dimensions of Baptism
quently as 'sinners'. He dies as an 'atoning sacrifice', or 'propitiation'
(lAdojios), and as such 'cleanses' (Ka0apt£ei) sinners of their sin and
guilt. All this, it can be argued, is implied in the Gospel of John itself, but
1 John makes it explicit, and Christian theology through the centuries has
followed 1 John in its reading of the Gospel. If John's Gospel and 1 John
have a comnion author, then the author has issued a clarification guarding
against a misreading of what he had written earlier.^28 If not, then a fol-
lower and associate has laid claim to the author's Gospel in opposition to
oilier would-be followers who interpreted it differently. Either way, what
seems to have prompted the clarification was a realization that dualism
was hot enough. There is light and there is darkness—but there are patches
of darkness even in the community of light. There are sinners and there are
righteous—but there are also sins of the righteous. For the sake of these
needs—'our' needs—Jesus must become, more explicitly than before, the
'propitiation' or 'atoning sacrifice', and the author of 1 John adds, almost
as an afterthought, 'and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole
world' (1 Jn 2.2). In the Johannine tradition, then, it was not the humanpredicament as such, but the problem of post-baptismal sin among believ-
ers that gave birth finally to a robust theology of the atonement.
- Vincent Taylor, for example, who held to the common authorship of John and
1 John, wrote: 'It is reasonable then to claim that in a later writing, compiled on a
different plan, the idea of the Sacrifice of Christ, so far from being alien to the writer's
mind, was likely to receive fuller development. The presence, therefore, of sacrificial
ideas to a greater and richer degree in the Epistle, is not a difficulty to be overcome; it
is a step to be expected' (The Atonement in New Testament Teaching [London:
Epworth Press, 1940], p. 217).