The Asymptote Explained

An asymptote is a line that a curve approaches but never reaches. In calculus, you see it when a function gets closer and closer to a boundary value with each step, the distance shrinking but never closing, the gap becoming smaller in proportion but never becoming zero. The curve and the line move in the same direction. The curve is always getting nearer. The curve never arrives.

The asymptote between the human person and the Creator is not a deficiency in us. It is the geometry of being created rather than being the Creator. God is infinite. We are finite. The gap between infinite and finite does not close from the finite side no matter how much the finite grows, because the infinite is not a very large finite. It is a categorically different kind of being. You can double a finite thing as many times as you like and it remains finite. The asymptote is not a measure of how far we have to travel. It is a description of what kind of being we are.

This is the structural fact underneath Matthew 5:3.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them." — Matthew 5:3 (NET)

Poverty of spirit is not a beginner's posture that the mature Christian graduates from. It is the permanent accurate description of our position before the Creator. The most advanced saint in the history of the church, at the height of their union with God, at the moment of their deepest experience of divine presence, is as dependent on God's crossing of the gap as the newest convert who does not yet know the vocabulary. The asymptote does not close from our side at any point. What changes is not the gap. What changes is the soul's orientation toward the gap — from anxious avoidance to glad reception.

The engineer notes: this is not a flaw in the design. A system in which the human soul could eventually close the gap to the Creator would be a system in which the soul eventually became the Creator, which is the original lie of the serpent and the original ambition of the tower of Babel. The asymptote is the protection of our createdness. It is the guarantee that we never lose ourselves in the divine by achieving divinity on our own terms. We remain human. The Creator remains the Creator. And the relationship between them — the relational knowing of John 17:3 — is precisely the relationship between those two different kinds of being: infinite giving and finite receiving, forever.