Not a project, but a task; not a promise, but an undertaking

"if the program of modernity is thus already sketched at the end of the ancient world and in the texts that founded the medieval world, in what sense does the modern project merit the adjective 'modern'?  The answer is found in the fuller phrase:  it is modern to the extent that it is, precisely, a project.  For it is not at all necessary that the human enterprise should conceive itself as a project.  The genus 'enterprise' in fact contains, alongside of project, another species that one could call task.  And task is opposed point for point to the three characteristics of the project that I laid out above.  Each in fact changes its sign:  with a task, (a) I receive the mission to do something from an origin I cannot control, but must discover; (b) I also must ask myself if I am up to my task, agreeing even to divest myself of what has otherwise been irrevocably entrusted to me; and finally, (c) I alone am responsible for what I am asked to accomplish, without being able to outsource it to an instance that would guarantee its success.
     "Now, with this idea of task, we are able to distinguish the Bible from modernity.  All the biblical images invoked above, including the idea of 'straining forward [epekteinomai] toward what lies ahead' (Phil. 3:13 NRSV), need to be understood in the light of task, not that of project.  The passage to modernity therefore can find its symbol, if not its symptom, in the evolution of literary genres from the epic, where the hero is invested  with a mission he must accomplish, to the novel, in which he departs seeking adventures, and hence following his fancy.
     "The relationship of humanity to nature can know many models.  It is not necessary that it be a conquest, nor that this conquest be connected with the idea of a 'kingdom of man,' nor, finally, that it take on the aspect of a domination realized by technology."

     Rémi Brague, The kingdom of man:  genesis and failure of the modern project, trans. Paul Seaton (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 5.
     This reminds me so much of the distinction Philip Turner made between the undertaking and the promise ("Undertakings and promises:  sexual ethics in the life of the church:  the 1990 Zabriskie Lecture series," Virginia Seminary journal (March 1991):  3-27; First things (April 1991):  36-42; Studies in Christian ethics 4, no. 2 (August 1991):  1-13).