Volf has served as an advisor for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and for several years co-taught a course at Yale with former British prime minister Tony Blair on globalization.

At the age of five his family moved to the multicultural city of Novi Sad, Serbia (then also part of Yugoslavia), where his father became a minister for the small Pentecostal community.

[6][independent source needed] In 1989 he received a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and started working on his Habilitation (a post-doctoral degree required by many continental European universities for a call to a professorship).

[6] The Habilitation was on "Trinity and Communion", a topic stimulated by Volf's long standing involvement in the official dialogue between the Vatican's Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the international Pentecostal movement.

Doctoral studies and compulsory military service interrupted his regular teaching, though he continued to offer intensive courses at the same institution.

[6] In 1991, Volf took a position as an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller, succeeding his former teacher at that institution, Paul King Jewett.

[citation needed] In 1998 Volf took the position of Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.

His contributions to theology have for the most part been topical; he wrote on human work, the nature of Christian community, the problem of otherness, violence and reconciliation, the question of memory, and the public role of faith, to name a few issues.

In this work, the central themes of Volf's work that receive more in depth treatment in other texts—God as unconditional love, the Trinitarian nature of God, creation as gift, Christ's death on the cross for the ungodly, justification by faith and communal nature of Christian life, love of enemy and care for the downtrodden, reconciliation and forgiveness, and hope for a world of love—come together into a unity.

Because it contains frequent reflections on concrete experiences, the book makes visible that Volf's theology both grows out of and leads to a life of faith.

In the process of writing the dissertation, Volf formulated an alternative theology of work, primarily situated in ecclesiology and eschatology, rather than in the doctrine of creation or of salvation, and associated with the Third, rather than the First or Second person of the Trinity.

This intense ecumenical engagement led Volf to explore the relation between the church as a community and the Trinity, and this topic became the subject of his Habilitationschrift.

The dissertation was published as "Trinität und Gemeinschaft: Eine Ökumenische Ekklesiologie" (1996; translated into English as "After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Triune God", 1998).

[9] As an alternative, Volf proposes a non-hierarchical account of church as a community rooted in an egalitarian understanding of the Trinity (since hierarchy is, in his judgment, unthinkable with regard to three equally divine persons).

In a series of articles he developed an account of the church's presence in the world as a "soft" and "internal" difference—roughly in contrast with either the "hard" difference of typically separatist (often Anabaptist) and transformationist (often Reformed) positions or the "attenuated difference" of those who tend to identify church and culture with each other (often Catholic and Orthodox stances)[11] He has taken up and further developed this position in A Public Faith (2011).

It won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for religion in 2002, and Christianity Today included it among its 100 most influential religious books of the twentieth century.

The book grew out of a lecture Volf gave in Berlin in 1993, in which his task was to reflect theologically about the Yugoslav Wars, marked by ethnic cleansing, that was raging in his home country at the time.

[16] "Solidarity with victims", central to his teacher Jürgen Moltmann's "theology of the cross", though dislodged from the center in Volf's proposal, still remains a key aspect of God's embrace of humanity.

In a novel move, Volf proposes that the sacred memory of Christ's passion and resurrection, properly understood, should guide Christians’ remembering of wrongs committed and suffered.

The most controversial part of The End of Memory is Volf's sustained theological argument, developed in dialogue with Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard, that remembering wrongs suffered and committed, if done rightly, will ultimately result in non-remembrance of the wrongdoing.

[20] The world of love, which is the Christian eschatological hope, will be realized when people and their relationships are healed to such an extent that former wrongdoing would, for lack of affective fuel, no longer come to mind.

Volf traveled domestically and internationally and spoke extensively on issues of reconciliation—in China, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, South Africa, New Zealand, various European countries, and, of course, the United States.

For instance, on the morning of 9/11/2001, at 8:34am when the first plane had hit the North Tower, he was finishing his keynote address at the International Prayer Breakfast at the United Nations.

He focuses on Islam partially because he comes from a region in which these two faiths have intersected for centuries (he was born in a city-fortress that the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I started building around 1700 to keep Ottoman Muslims at bay) and partly because he considers the relations between these two religions to be today's most critical interfaith issue.

Since 2004 Volf has taken part in the Building Bridges Seminar, a yearly gathering of Muslim and Christian scholars chaired until 2012 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

[27] Love for and fear of that common God can, therefore, bring Muslims and Christians together, or at least be the basis for resolving conflicts without resorting to violence.

Some of these texts were on issues at the intersection between faith and culture (as, for instance, those dealing with the religious dimensions of the poetry of the Serbian poet Aleksa Šantić, which were the seed for his first book, done in collaboration with the Croatian painter Marko Živković and titled I znam da sunce ne boji se tame ["The Sun Doesn’t Fear Darkness"].

Through this course and in his work with globalization more broadly, Volf is seeking to think through all these issues not from a generically human standpoint suspended above concrete traditions—which he believes does not exist—but from the perspective of the Christian faith.

[29] In A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (2011) Volf summed up his reflections over the years on how Christians should interact with the surrounding culture broadly conceived.

Examples include the following: He was a member of the Global Agenda Council on Faith and on Values of the World Economic Forum (2009–2011); he worked with the Advisory Council of President Obama's Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships; he gave a keynote address at the International Prayer Breakfast at the United Nations (on 9/11) and spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington (2010); he delivered a keynote address at the international Military Chief of Chaplains conference in Cape Town, South Africa (2008).