Piper was born on January 11, 1946, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Bill and Ruth Piper.[13] His father was a traveling evangelist for over 60 years.[14] Before Piper was one year old, his family moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where he spent the remainder of his youth, graduating from Wade Hampton High School in 1964.
According to Piper, he had a religious conversion at his mother's knee on a family vacation in Florida when he was six years old.[15] Piper has remarked that the fact he was converted at the age of six "blows him away", not because he remembers the event, but due to his belief in the Bible's telling of the hopeless condition of all humans who have not been converted.[16][17]
Piper married Noël Henry in December 1968,[18] and together, they have four sons and a daughter.[19] He studied at Wheaton College between 1964 and 1968, majoring in literature and minoring in philosophy.[20] Studying romantic literature with Clyde Kilby led him to be interested in poetry,[21] Piper has published several books of poetry,[22] and continues to pursue, with his poetry, the deeper reality of personal,[23] theological[24] and social[25] reality. He has explained in both prose and poetry why he writes.[26] C. S. Lewis has remained a profound influence in Piper's life, in large measure, Piper says, because of the "combination of rational precision with language, and profound poetic perception of reality."[27]
In the fall of 1966, Piper caught mononucleosis, and during this infection, he listened to the Pastor Harold John Ockenga on WETN, his college's radio station.[28] Piper dated his call to the ministry of God’s word to that experience: “I can remember listening there on my bed to his messages on the radio and feeling inside my heart simply explode with longing to be able to handle the word of God the way he was handling it in the pulpit at Edman Chapel. Before those three weeks were over, I had resolved to drop organic chemistry… That was, I believe, my call to the ministry of the word.”[29]
Piper spent three years being taught by Daniel Fuller at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, from 1968 to 1971, and says that Daniel Fuller's influence on him was enormous.[30] Three things are traceable to that influence: attention to exegetical detail in Bible study[31] (indeed in all reading[32]), a central conviction of the all-embracing sovereignty of God,[33] and what Piper came to call Christian Hedonism.[34]
Piper received his Doctor of Theology degree in New Testament studies at the University of Munich, Germany (1971–1974) under Leonhard Goppelt. His dissertation, Love Your Enemies, was published by Cambridge University Press and Baker Book House. Upon completion of his doctorate, Piper taught biblical studies at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for six years between 1974 and 1980.[35]
Piper's mother died on December 16, 1974, in a bus wreck in Israel.[36] Following this incident in 1990, a tribute to her was included in Piper's booklet What's the Difference?.