The second half of the 18th century brought new currency to Martin Opitz s dictum that poetry is concealed theology at its root. Johann Caspar Lavater s drama Abraham and Isaac (1776) turns the biblical narrative into an exemplary illustration of his unshakeable conviction that man can affect God s decisions through faith and prayer. In Friedrich Schiller s Semele (1779) the question of God s credible self-disclosure to humans proves to be a kind of concealed theology."