The making of new identity in Christ and the effect of believing in promises have been themes in Volf's work since Exclusion and Embrace. No surprise to hear him saying these things in his book on Memory:
This new identity – not humanly acquired but divinely bestowed, even in the midst of our ruin – helps to heal wounded selves. We remember wrongs suffered as people with identities defined by God, not by wrongdoers' evil deeds and their echo in our memory. True, sometimes that echo is so powerful that it drowns out all other voices. Still behind the unbearable noise of wrongdoing suffered, we can hear in faith the divinely composed music of our true identity... p. 80
And then:
In the Christian view of life...future possibilities do not grow simply out of the actuality of the past and present...instead of arising simply from what was or what is, the future comes the realm of what is not yet...In Jesus Christ, God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities – a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, however devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise – if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it – they will...enter a world 'marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves... P. 82
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