Gerhard Ebeling: Beyond a self-evident God

"Theology had in earlier days almost always, explicitly or tacitly, built upon the assumption that the reality of God may be pre-supposed as self-evident. Yet what confronted theology with a new situation was not only the realization of the lack of strict conclusiveness in the so-called proofs of God, nor only (though much more than that) the mass production of views of self and of reality in which God had no role to play: it was also theology's own realization that a God who is self-evident, or who is proved and established by argument, would not be God. The reality of God makes itself known only by revelation to faith."

—Gerhard Ebeling, "Theology and Reality," in Word and Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 193.