Do you ever sit down to read your Bible, searching for textbook answers? I do, sometimes. Curled up on the couch with my pencil pouch, I allow theological facts, well-formed and hard as rubber, to bounce around my brain. I open my Bible to Mark 5. Jesus tells the little girl to wake up. Quickly noting his omnipotence, I miss out. I don’t see Jesus take her hand. I don’t see the person who made every good thing sit down beside death, cradle a little girl, and make it right. I miss God’s invitation to behold him through story.
Jed Ostoich (ThM, 2014), the Executive Editor of Discovery Series and Short-form Digital Content for Our Daily Bread Ministries, longs for people to see God. He wants others to experience the fullness of God’s personhood. Jed sees God encounters taking place through story, an idea he fleshes out in his book Of Deity and Dust: A Guided Journey through the Bible’s Complete Narrative.
In the Ostoich household, Bible stories were as common as the air they breathed. Born in a Wyoming train-station town, Jed’s family moved to the Appalachian/Kentucky part of Pennsylvania when he was six years old. Jed’s love for adventure and his imagination grew as he explored the woods surrounding their home. He spent hours wandering through the valleys and trees, not worrying about anyone finding him.
His adventures continued as Jed attended Moody Bible Institute, where he unexpectedly fell in love with Chicago. After graduation, he married Jocelyn, and the two of them moved to Dallas. Jed started seminary, and Jocelyn worked on her master’s degree in counseling. It was an adventure, figuring out how to find an apartment, pay the bills, coordinate schedules, and get jobs. They discovered lifelong friends through their spiritual formation group. Some of the SF guys also introduced Jed to disc golf, a pastime that maintained his sanity through several Greek exegeticals.
Jed’s plan? Earn his ThM with a dual emphasis in Old Testament and Bible Exposition before transitioning to PhD work in Ancient Semitics and Old Testament. Jed took a class from one of his Moody professors, Michael Rydelnik (ThM, 1983). Jed had known Michael since childhood, as Jed’s parents, Paul (ThM, 1983; DMCE, 2010) and Jodie, became best friends with Michael and his wife, Eva, during their Moody student days. Jed’s classmates didn’t know about the connection and were left a little bewildered as the pair argued animatedly over the Talmud. Jed and Michael thoroughly enjoyed themselves, both recognizing a place for argument in the classroom.
Everything was going according to plan until his final year. Jed had avoided taking his communications electives until the end of his degree. He even asked the dean if he could swap them out for other classes. The dean’s no changed Jed’s long-term career. Jed walked unenthusiastically into Dr. Sandi Glahn’s (ThM, 2001) Writing for Publication course. During that semester, Dr. Glahn’s patient but no-silly-business approach challenged Jed. He thought he was already a good writer and that he didn’t need that class. He learned quite quickly that wasn’t true.
Jed went back for seconds, taking Dr. Glahn’s May-semester creative writing course. It turned out to be his most challenging class. Pouring over Hebrew and Greek paradigms took effort. Spending four hours in an intensive writing seminar and then writing for six hours at home for two weeks straight was hard. After that class, Jed became Dr. Glahn’s teaching assistant, and he’s been teaching with her ever since. Jed also connected with the writing, editing, and publishing world through the students he met in those classes. That’s how Fathom magazine got started: a couple of students realizing a shared passion for a different way to write about faith. Not only did the seminary equip Jed to pursue Ancient Semitics, but it also equipped him for his unexpected shift into the Christian publishing world.
Jed and Jocelyn moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2020. It was another adventure for the couple; they moved across the States, had a baby, bought a house, and started new jobs. Jed started working as a senior editor for the Discovery Series product line for Our Daily Bread Ministries. Their Discovery Series booklets combined Jed’s rich breadth of biblical and theological knowledge with his writing skills. The booklets, themed for a monthly deep dive into a topic or Scripture passage, offered a way for Jed to invite people into a deeper experience of God’s Word, bridging the gap between the academic and lay worlds.
The questions Jed had in seminary continued to percolate. With a lighter last year of seminary, Jed began exploring some of his ideas, taking independent courses with Dr. Glahn and Dr. Elliott Johnson (ThM, 1964; ThD, 1968). He worked on a theory concerning the literary nature of the Bible—not a literary analysis or hermeneutic, but rather a theory asking: What is the Bible doing, at a literary level, to show us the character of God? He’d begun that conversation earlier with Dr. Johnson in his Bible exposition classes as he struggled with insular approaches to books of the Bible. After all, the Bible is a divinely intended collection, authored by God, the primary character, for his self-revelation. Dr. Gordon Johnston (ThM, 1985; ThD, 1992) helped him wrestle through the issues. The thing that most compelled him was his professors’ humility.
Jed continued pushing into the topic of beholding God through story after moving to Michigan, exercising his content for Sunday school classes, conferences, and Bible studies. After six or seven years, his wife jokingly told him he needed to write down his thoughts. If he died, no one would be able to access his materials. Her joke, along with other’s requests for non-existent teaching notes, prompted Jed to write an initial draft. Published last year, his book guides readers through God’s grand story. Created for the people struggling to make sense of the Bible, Of Deity and Dust: A Guided Journey through the Bible’s Complete Narrative helps readers see the God they hear preached on Sunday morning but don’t experience during trials.
Seminary courses equipped Jed with a rich reservoir of sound content and a variety of approaches to study the Bible and theology. When those materials and approaches didn’t seem to square with one another, he doggedly worked to figure out how they paired beautifully to reveal God’s character, utilizing one of God’s chosen mediums for revelation: story. In a world populated by epic tales and Marvel superheroes, it’s clear we desire something or someone more. We long to encounter someone supremely good, true, and beautiful. That is the common longing of the human heart. God, in his great grace, extends an invitation to humanity, welcoming people to behold him. He delivers that invitation through a medium enjoyed by all. Jed doesn’t want people to miss that. He wants them to see God as God wants to be seen—through story. In a world compelled by narrative, we have the most compelling story that reveals a living God. It is our honor and great delight to immerse ourselves in that story and then to tell it.
Morgan Dau (ThM, 2023) is an administrative assistant for the Alumni and Career Services Office at Dallas Theological Seminary and a PhD student and writer. She and her husband, An, along with their black cat, call Dallas home.