Theology begins with God’s self-revelation. Everything we know about God first came from God. This means we only know things about him because he first taught them to us. We do not know God “as he is” in himself; we know him as he acts in history, as he has chosen to introduce himself to us.
Coming to “know” God is like meeting a stranger who has come to rescue us from the danger we did not even realise existed. How we know what we know about God as well as how God reveals himself to us in the gospel—namely, through the illumination of the Spirit in the written Word of God and consummately in Jesus Christ. God’s self-revelation corrects our distorted view of him, of ourselves, and of our world.