137. Rejecting Verbal Inspiration.--Even the doctrines of the verbal inspiration and the complete inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures have been assailed by prominent representatives of the General Council and the _Lutheran Church Review_. Dr. H.E. Jacobs, in his introduction to _Biblical Criticism_ (1903) by Dr. J.A.W. Haas, states: "It is, therefore, the Word and not the words; the divine substance and not the particular human form in which that substance is clothed; the divine truth and not the human language, with all its limitations, which, in accommodation to human finiteness, the Holy Spirit employs, that is 'the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'" (18.) "Nevertheless, the subordination of the words of Holy Scripture to the Word in no way diminishes the need of the most reverent handling and the most careful judgment of the words themselves when considered in the place which they are intended to serve." (19.) "A text from Genesis and one from John, one from the Psalms, and another from Romans, cannot stand upon the same footing.... Many a precious passage in the Old Testament can no longer be used as the sincere expression of Christian faith in the light of the clearer revelation of the Gospel." (21.) "There are few theorists who would assign the same degree of inspiration to the statistics and rolls in Ezra or Chronicles as to those parts of the New Testament for whose reading the dying ask when all other earthly words have lost their interest. Even the distinction between the Petrine and the Pauline theology, which the Tuebingen school so greatly exaggerated, contains within it an element of truth, when the difference is found to be one of degree, but not one of kind." (21.) "The time has come when, in antagonism to such [radical] criticism, the Church must offer a restatement of its doctrine of the Holy Scriptures. The theories of our dogmaticians are not the confessional declarations of our Church. The Augsburg Confession contains no statement on this topic." (26.) "It is only the Formula of Concord that gives an official utterance.... But it formulates no definition either of revelation or inspiration. It simply presents to us in the Scriptures an inerrant and infallible judge concerning all religious truth.... Religious truth, it declares, 'is to be received only as revealed in God's Word," and for this Word we turn to the Scriptures." (27.) "For the truths made known by such revelation we are referred to a record. But that such a certain and indubitable record should be made, another supernatural act is necessary, and this is inspiration. This includes everything that is necessary to render the record an infallible standard of all religious truth." (27.) "If the verbal theory of inspiration mean that every word and letter are inspired, so that the writer was purely passive and performed a merely mechanical office, as 'the pen of the Holy Ghost,' this, we hold, is an assumption for which we have no warrant....