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).

"the [very] center of theological thinking"

"To pursue the problem of church discipline to the depth of its rootedness and the breadth of its branchings out is to be referred to the [very] center of theological thinking.  Indeed, of all of the questions that beset the church today and demand resolution, I know of none upon which the themes of theology converge so decisively, none whose resolution is so urgent and would be of such fundamental and far-reaching significance, as that of church discipline."

     Gerhard Ebeling, a member of the Confessing Church that opposed Hitler, in a lecture (Kirchenzucht (1947)) delivered first in Berlin in 1943, as quoted by Dorothea Sattler, in her "Sündige Menschen in der Gemeinschaft der Heiligen?  Alte und neue Frage nach der Kirchenzucht in ökumenischer Perspektive," Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 127 (2005):  272, as translated by me.

"the Lord takes thought for me"

"As for me, I am poor and needy; but the Lord takes thought for me."

וַאֲנִ֤י עָנִ֣י וְאֶבְיֹון֮ אֲדֹנָ֪י יַחֲשָׁ֫ב לִ֥י

     Ps 40:18, RSV.  In context, "the Lord devises [salvation, help, deliverance] for me."  (Interesting how close this is in form to Gen 15:6:  וְהֶאֱמִ֖ן בַּֽיהוָ֑ה וַיַּחְשְׁבֶ֥הָ לֹּ֖ו צְדָקָֽה, "And [Abram] believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.")

"instruments of the human soul"

     "Werkzeuge der menschlichen Seele" is the ontological status that Marianne Schark, in her Lebewesen versus Dinge:  eine metaphysische Studie (Berlin:  de Gruyter, 2005), assigns the tools we create, according to Ludwig Jaskolla, "Der Mensch als 'homo faber'?  Überlegungen zur Philosophie der Technik," Stimmen der Zeit 233, no. 6 (June 2015):  389 (385-392).
     More from Jaskolla, who (it must be admitted) does here little more than re-state the obvious:

Technology is not a marginal phenomenon of culture-creating man, but a fundamental constant of man in general:  we are creative beings through and through!  [(386)] 

this creative activity can therefore only be good in the ethical sense when it serves the well being of man [(dem gelingenden Leben des Menschen)].  Only technology that contributes to our realization of the potential of man as an integral whole [(unsere ganzheitliche Potenziale des Manschen)] is good technology [(389)].

Yet because our understanding of the reality we modify, regulate, and change—not to mention our grasp of the consequences of our actions—is never complete, our creative, technological capacities must be exercised with great humility (391).

"the problem about real life"

"in any given social situation it is frequently the case that many different transactions are taking place at one and the same time between members of the same group.  Not one game is being played, but several, and, if the game metaphor may be stretched further, the problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net."

     Alasdair McIntyre, "The character of generalizations in social science and their lack of predictive power," chap. 8 in After virtue:  a study in moral theory (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 93-94 (84-102).  Indeed with a "move" in no "game" (an row-raising insult, an upset of the board, a pulling of the fire alarm).

Almost another John the Baptist?

As played by Michael Grennell

"If a face-to-face meeting was meant to intimidate Throckmorton, Cromwell and the King had misjudged their man.  Sir George . . . turned the King’s talk of his conscientious scruples in an even bolder direction than Temys:  'I feared if ye did marry Queen Anne, your conscience would be more troubled at length, for that it is thought ye have meddled with the mother and the sister.'  Caught badly off guard by this breathtaking directness, the King retorted defensively, 'Never with the mother,' while Cromwell lashed out in an effort to save the situation, 'Nor never with the sister neither, and therefore put that out of your mind.'
     "So Henry had admitted adultery (or, in his eyes, fornication) with Mary Boleyn, though not the Countess of Wiltshire."

     Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer:  a revolutionary life (New York:  Viking, 2018), 167.  From p. 166:  Sir George Throckmorton

came from a family inclined throughout the sixteenth century to express their often sharply contrasting political opinions with pugnacity.  His literary style in letters to Cromwell is marked by its brisk straightforwardness, and he was not afraid to strike out on his own line against Crown interests on matters of local administration:  all around, not a man to be trifled with.

(But this all came from a confession extracted from Throckmorton in the Autumn of 1637.  What is more, Throckmorton's "breathtaking directness" "beyond Parliament" was to cost another, his friend Sir Thomas Dingley, his life (167).)
     Cf. the pugnacity of Throckmorton to that of the Observant Franciscans.

"The intolerability of the thought that man is preserved in being"

"There was . . . no place in the thought of antiquity for a [(for the post-Scholastic, modern)] concept of self preservation [(Selbsterhaltung)]....
     "The Middle Ages left behind a question of which antiquity was unaware.  The Middle Ages put the question—in all truth brought it forth—because it believed that it had the answer to it.  The answer created the need for the problem.  The answer was the extravagant claim of a constant, inward, and most radical dependence of the world on God [(einer ständigen, innigsten, radikalsten Abhängigkiet der Welt von Gott)].  He is not only its once and for all creator, its regent and administrator.  He must also be its 'preserver [(Erhalter)]' in the strictest sense.  The concepts of continual creation and divine concursion [(der creatio continua und des concursus divinus)], peculiar to the Middle Ages, arose from a consistent conformity to this answer.  In the face of the entire stock of ideas which it had received from ancient metaphysics, the Middle Ages forced itself to conceive of nothing, or the void (nihil), almost as the normal metaphysical state of affairs and to think of the creation from nothing [(die creatio ex nihilo)] as a miracle [(Wunder)] constantly effected against this normality.  This [post medieval, modern] return from the abyss of contingency could not bring about a restoration of ancient indubitability.  The new answer to the question (which itself had since been radicalized) had to be even more radical in the sense of assuring its rationality.  The material which the reception of Stoicism offered did not meet this need."

     Hans Blumenberg, "Self-preservation and inertia:  on the constitution of modern rationality," Contemporary German philosophy 3 (1983):  218 (209-256), a translation of "Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung:  zur Konstitution der neuzeitlichen Rationalität," in Subjektivität und Selbsterhaltung, ed. Hans Ebeling (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 1976), 145-207, in which this occurs on pp. 156-157.  The heading comes from p. 216/153 ("Die Unerträglichkeit des Gedankens, der Mensch werde im Dasein erhalten").