If there is an I, it is "I am a new creation in Christ", not a justification for pride. I think you're reading too much into a concession to my viewpoint, it's just a way of saying that there isn't room for pride.
Ah, this is a valid objection, and to be clear, the I in Christ I was speaking of is from His perspective, not from ours, except insofar as what you said, that we are recreated in Christ, and that He does call us by name. Rather, in saying there is an I in Christ, I was seeking to point to the unity and individuality of His personhood within the Holy and Undivided Trinity, for like His unoriginate Father who begat Him before all ages, and the Holy Spirit, our comforter and Paraclete, who is everywhere present and fills all things, who eternally proceeds from the Father, Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made, who is our Advocate and who after the resurrection will also stand in judgement over all as Pantocrator (thus, Him being our advocate is rather reassuring) is a distinct person, with a distinct hypostasis in which He unites our created human nature with the uncreated divine nature, the essence of the unoriginate Father that is shared with His uncreated, coequal and coeternal Son and Holy Spirit, uniting the three divine persons as One God, an eternal union of perfect love that is the template for our human families and relations, or as we would say in my church, we are called to make our relationships with our family, with the members of our church, and with mankind as a whole an icon of the Trinity, recreating the love between the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the love between ourselves and our spouse, all our children, all our brethren and all our neighbors. Such love requires absolute humility and the complete rejection of pride, because it requires us to be willing, as Christ was for us, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to the point of being willing to die for him.
Very few people, if any at all, are able to get to such a state of holiness in this life, but by striving to get there as if running a race, as St. Paul put it, we can give much love to many, and with our God who is infinitely merciful and infinitely loving, that counts for a lot. But the race is something we must be willing to try to compete in: St. Silouan the Athonite, an Orthodox monastic, warned that there are two thoughts from which every Christian must flee, the first one being ”I am saintly”, and the second one being “My sins are so great I cannot be saved.” In the first case, we fall into a spiritual delusion (which Slavic Christians call Prelest, which more than being a word, refers to an entire concept within Orthodox theology whereby we can be deceived; the word prelest is not intended to be used in a judgemental or forensic manner, but rather someone in a state of prelest is to be prayed for, because they are being successfully deceived, which is dangerous to them and to this around them).
Among the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who were the early ascetic Christian hermits and proto-monastics who lived a life of prayer in places such as Scetis and the Thebaid following the example of St. Anthony the Great, there were examples of men being deceived by demons, exploiting their pride, into believing they had already attained the fullness of divine glory and were to be born aloft to Heaven by waiting angels as was Elijah. At least one fell to his death, and another was restrained by one of his monastic brethren before going over the edge.
Despair is equally dangerous, because if we believe we have no hope of salvation, we will stop running what St. Paul describes as the race, and defeated, we will lapse into nihilistic despair and likely wind up embracing a heresy or a false religion. My considered opinion is that a great many former Christians who now practice occult religions such as Wicca or other even more dangerous and seductive religions such as Buddhism and certain forms of Hinduism, and various materialist religions such as Marxist-Leninism or Hedonist Objectivism, do so on the basis of having felt hopelessness at the prospect of their salvation, which is particularly a risk in extremely legalistic churches, but is also a risk even in Reformed churches, where the idea that one could be a reprobate without realizing it exists, or in churches whose soteriological model does not promote continued thanksgiving and encourage seeking the aid of God the Holy Spirit in resisting temptation and struggling against sin, because here, the paradigm loops over on itself and we go from despairing of our salvation to believing we have become saintly, and thus need to repent no longer, and thus fall into the trap of pride once more.
Thus, in summary, allow me to quote St. Paul in his Epistle to the Colossians:
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”
