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Van Buren concludes that Christianity will have to strip itself of its supernatural elements to become believable again, just as alchemy had to abandon its mystical overtones to become the useful science of chemistry. Many Christians firmly disagree, and van Buren has been roundly charged with clarifying Christian doctrine to the point where there is hardly anything left of it. But even some theologians who disagree with van Buren's conclusions admit that Christian thinkers can no longer dismiss the linguistic approach as invalid or irrelevant. Professor Ian Ramsey of Oxford, a pioneer in relating linguistic philosophy to theology, goes so far as to argue that some analytical religious thinkers "are on the threshold of a theological revolution which might prove to be more significant than the relationship of Aristotelianism to scholasticism."
