Truth & Meaning

I just read this article in Touchstone Magazine. It was an address given by Michael Ward (a British Anglican Lewis Scholar, friend of Sam Wells) at Wheaton on C.S. Lewis. He makes the following comments. I wonder what others think?

"For Christianity is not only true, it is also meaningful. ‘Of course,’ you say, ‘to be true, Christianity has to be meaningful, for meaning is the antecedent of truth!” Yes, but go with me here. Suppose truth and meaning could be separated. Which do you find yourself automatically regarding as the more important: truth or meaningfulness? It’s an interesting thought experiment to conduct on yourself.

When addressing mostly conservative Christians, I wouldn’t expect to find anyone prepared to describe Christianity as untrue, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were many for whom Christian does not really mean very much…

Lewis once wrote that the mythical element in Christianity is the really nourishing element in the whole concern. He evens goes so far as to say that a man who thought Christianity untrue, yet constantly fed on its imaginative meaning, might be more spiritually alive than someone who accepted Christianity as ‘true’ but never thought much about it.

The organ of meaning and the organ of reason are, of course, both necessary to a full Christian life; but an excessive emphasis on the truth of Christianity, as if it were simply a matter of intellectual assent, at the expense of Christianity’s meaningfulness, at deeper, imaginative levels—that may be damaging. Truth is always about something, Lewis wrote; but meaningfulness is that about which truth is.”