The particularities and contingencies of our personal histories are effaced by a version of grace that, rather than saving us, simply obliterates this “I” that has a past. Of course, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). Baptism is a burial, and we rise to newness of life (Rom. 6:4). But the new creation is a resurrection, not a reset; we know because of the scars. Just as the resurrected Christ bears the mark of his wounds—his “history” with the Roman Empire—so the new self in Christ is the resurrection of a self with a past. The “I” is saved only if this me with
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