Nicholas Wolterstorff

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Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff (born January 21, 1932) is an American philosopher and theologian. He is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He writes on aesthetics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and education. With Alvin Plantinga and William Alston, he helped develop Reformed epistemology, the view that belief in God can be rational even without hard evidence. He helped start the journals Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Wolterstorff was born in Bigelow, Minnesota, to Dutch immigrant parents. He earned a BA in philosophy from Calvin College in 1953, then a MA and PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1956. He spent a year at Cambridge and then taught as an instructor at Yale (1957–1959). He then became a Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College for 30 years. He is now retired from Yale.

In 1987 he published Lament for a Son, about coping with the death of his 25-year-old son, Eric, in a mountain climbing accident. The book shows how his Christian faith helped him grieve and heal. Wolterstorff has been a visiting professor at many universities around the world and received an honorary doctorate from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2007. He retired in 2002. His memoir was published in 2019.

Wolterstorff lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife Claire. They have four grown children and seven grandchildren; their oldest son died in a climbing accident.

His thinking is influenced by Augustine, Calvin, Kuyper, Henry Stob, and Henry Zylstra, as well as by Thomas Reid and Alvin Plantinga. He argues against strict foundationalism, saying knowledge starts from direct insights into reality. In his book Justice in Love, he questions some traditional Christian ideas such as penal substitutionary atonement and justification by faith alone.