The Word Was Meaning II: Meaning Potential, Meaner, and Consciousness

In a previous post, we explored John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word”—as a mythic construal of meaning as the origin of reality. The logos, in this reading, is not a supernatural person but a divine principle: the structured semiotic potential from which all meaning (and thus all “reality”) is actualised.

But if we’re not treating the Word—or Elohim—as a person in the traditional sense, does that mean we’re denying personhood altogether?

Not at all. In this model, personhood is not erased but reframed. What we’re doing is reading personhood semiotically. That is: not as a metaphysical substance, but as a structured capacity to mean—a particular way in which the principle of meaning becomes individuated in the world.

From this perspective, meaning potential, meaner, and consciousness are not separate things. They’re three different construals of the same underlying principle:

• Meaning potential is the system of meaning before it is actualised—like language before speech, or divine potential before creation.

• Meaner is the participant in that system—the one who instantiates meaning in context, like the speaker in a conversation, or the creator in Genesis.

• Consciousness is the experiential interiority of that process—the reflective space where meaning unfolds and is re-construed. It is not outside meaning, but meaning in its most inward form.

So when John writes that “in the beginning was the Word”, he names not just a system, not just a speaker, and not just a reflective presence—but all three at once. Meaning potential, meaner, and consciousness are interwoven dimensions of what the Word is.

This reframing also sheds light on Adam and Eve in Genesis 1–2. Rather than being made as separate “souls” from outside the system, they can be read as individuations of Elohim—as distinct meaning potentials differentiated within the divine semiotic ground.

In other words:

• Elohim is the system of meaning potential.

• Adam and Eve are its individuated participants—human meaners.

• Their “souls” are not implants but emergent capacities to mean within and through the system.

This is how a semiotic reading preserves personhood: not by treating it as a metaphysical add-on, but by understanding it as an enactment of meaning. Personhood is the instantiation of the divine system in individuated form. And what we call “consciousness” is the interior unfolding of that instantiation.

So to theological readers: reframing Elohim as principle doesn’t negate the idea of a divine person. It re-situates personhood as one mode of meaning, and one that is not exclusive to God, but shared—differentiated and distributed—among human participants.

We are, after all, made “in the image” of that principle.