Wolterstorff was born on January 21, 1932,[4] to Dutch emigrants in a small farming community in southwest Minnesota.

In a series of short essays, Wolterstorff recounts how he drew on his Christian faith to cope with his grief.

While an undergraduate at Calvin College, Wolterstorff was greatly influenced by professors William Harry Jellema, Henry Stob, and Henry Zylstra, who introduced him to schools of thought that have dominated his mature thinking: Reformed theology and common sense philosophy.

Wolterstorff builds upon the ideas of the Scottish common-sense philosopher Thomas Reid, who approached knowledge "from the bottom-up".

[5] In Justice in Love, he rejects fundamentist notions of Christianity that hold to the necessity of the penal substitutionary atonement and justification by faith alone.