The years of his study in Berlin, Marburg, and Zürich fell in the period of Nazism in Germany, and his contact with Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as his work in the Confessing Church had an enduring influence on his thought.
He completed his Doctor of Theology degree in 1938 at the University of Zürich under the supervision of Fritz Blanke [de; sk]; his dissertation was entitled Evangelical Interpretation of the Gospels: An Investigation of Luther's Hermeneutic.
Gerhard Ebeling held honorary doctorates from the universities of Bonn (1952), Uppsala (1970), St. Louis (1971), Edinburgh (1981), Neuchâtel (1993),[citation needed] and Tübingen (1997).
Both Ebeling and Fuchs stressed the character and power of language, the role of the Bible in the pulpit (Wesley O. Allen, Determining the Form, Structures for Preaching, 2008).
In researching Luther's interpretation of the Psalms, Ebeling discovered the central role of the coram-relation [de; ko] and developed the idea in the context of an ontology.