[Although] man knows number and its secret he no longer knows that even number, which determines days, years and seasons, is not self contained, that it too rests only upon the Word and command of God. Number is not itself the truth of God. Like everything else it is his creature and it receives its truth from the Creator. We have forgotten this connexion. When we have number we believe we have truth and eternity. We become aware of this loss when we realize that mathematics too in the last resort does not transcend the world of the paradox. The end of godless calculation is in paradox, in contradiction. So it is for us. In the middle we hear of the world's beginning, as also in the middle we know of the fixed and of number, and not otherwise. But just in this way the world of the fixed is revealed to us anew in its essential being. Because we no longer understand number in its primary meaning we no longer understand the language of the fixed world. What we comprehend is the godless language we speak ourselves, the language of an eternal law of the world resting in itself, silent about the Creator and boasting about the creature. But when we hear of the Creator who in the beginning created the world we know of the lost connexion and believe in God as the Creator, without grasping how he rules over the world of the fixed, without seeing the world of the fixed, the world of number, in its true creatureliness. So we do not see the world of the fixed, of the unchangeable in its original state - the law has become autonomous - but we believe in God as its Creator.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, Temptation: Two Biblical Studies