The Sacred Depths: A Christological Reading of MacFarlane’s Underland

Robert MacFarlane’s Underland explores humanity’s relationship with the subterranean world through journeys into caves, burial chambers, underground rivers, and other spaces beneath the Earth’s surface. While ostensibly a work of nature writing, the book carries profound theological resonance, particularly as it relates to Christology. What follows is a reading of MacFarlane’s underground explorations as unexpected commentary on the mystery of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection.

The Underland as Sacred Repository

MacFarlane observes that humans have a paradoxical relationship with what lies beneath our feet. The earth serves as both repository and refuge. We entrust to the ground what we fear—waste, bodies—and what we cherish—seeds, treasures. This duality of disposal and preservation reveals a profound truth: the earth becomes a metaphysical threshold between loss and renewal.

This pattern of burial and emergence finds its ultimate expression in Christ’s crucifixion and burial. The earth that receives “what we fear and wish to lose” while preserving “what we love and wish to save” becomes the temporary tomb of divinity itself. Christ enters the underland as the ultimate sin-bearer—the embodiment of humanity’s darkest fears—while simultaneously being the treasure beyond price. His emergence transforms the underland from a place of ending to one of beginning.

Christ in Deep Time

MacFarlane introduces “deep time”—a perspective viewing present moments within an ancient narrative of “making and unmaking,” part of a web of gift, inheritance, and legacy. Within this framework, Christ emerges as the ultimate reimagining of humanity’s story, the eternal breaking into the temporal. As both ancient Word present at creation and redemptive fulfillment of prophecy, Christ represents the perfect convergence of past, present, and future. In Him, our troubled present is reimagined not as isolated struggle but as part of a grand narrative of divine love spanning all of deep time.

Darkness as Illumination

One of MacFarlane’s most striking insights is that “darkness might be a medium of vision” and “dissent may be a movement towards revelation.” This challenges our assumption that light alone reveals truth and suggests descending into darkness can lead to deeper comprehension.

This paradoxical wisdom finds its ultimate expression in the Cross. The darkest moment in cosmic history—God dying in apparent defeat—becomes the greatest revelation of divine love. Christ’s descent into death was not an abandonment of his mission but its fulfillment. As MacFarlane notes, “to understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep down dark.” This perfectly captures how Christ’s burial wasn’t defeat but transformation, revealing that divine light is fully understood only through experiencing darkness. There was never a darker moment than when Christ hung on the cross, yet he is the light of the world. It was in witnessing this event that humanity could truly say, “I was blind but now I see.”

Earth and Resurrection

MacFarlane explores how the word “human” derives from the Latin for earth and soil, revealing humanity’s inseparable bond to the ground—our beginning and end marked by dust. The death of Jesus transforms this cycle. Though divine, Christ embraced complete human mortality, his body laid in an earthen tomb. Yet in this supreme act of humbling, death’s permanence was undone. His return to dust wasn’t merely completion of the human cycle but its transcendence, rewriting the meaning of our etymology.

MacFarlane observes that “down here the boundaries between life and not life are less clear.” This speaks to how underground spaces reveal complex transitions between different states of being—and parallels how Christ’s body in the tomb represents a profound liminal state, neither dead in the decaying sense nor yet resurrected, challenging our binary understanding of life and death.

Science and Faith: The Divine Contradiction

MacFarlane’s journey from Christianity to physics—and his realization that modern physics is “even stranger and more bizarre than anything he learned in Sunday school”—resonates with the conviction that science and religion are not in opposition but mutually illuminating. Like a thumb and fingers working in opposition to grasp objects, science and faith work together to help us comprehend reality.

MacFarlane writes that no divinity he would wish to believe in would declare himself by means of recognizable evidence—if he were to detect proof of deity, he would distrust that deity. This aligns perfectly with the message of the cross. The cross doesn’t appear as evidence causing belief in Jesus but as its opposite: a man cursed by God. The message of a crucified God in human form is so impossible to detect because it is present everywhere, like the trillions of neutrinos passing through our bodies every second yet remaining difficult to detect precisely because of their ubiquity.

The Web of Life and the Cruciform Image

In describing the relationship between fungi and trees, MacFarlane reveals how they “had forged their duality into a oneness thereby making a forest.” What initially appears as beautiful trees plagued by destructive organisms underneath is revealed as beautiful symbiosis—fungi aren’t ugly or destructive but the invisible ingredient tying the forest together into a living organism. This illustrates the role of Christ’s crucifixion: Jesus as the ultimate fungus connecting all life into a cohesive whole.

The Latin word oscillore—to kiss—describes how trees and fungi connect, making it “hard to say where one being ends and another begins.” This blurring of boundaries challenges our conception of distinct species and reflects the flowing interconnectedness of all living beings. The Genesis account speaks of creation “after their kind,” but the root meaning suggests a portioning out from God’s pool of goods—cards dealt from a divine deck. And what is God dealing? Parts of himself as a crucified deity. The misconception of “species” as drawing fixed boundaries contradicts what both biology and Christology tell us: there are no fixed boundaries; all blur and blend. Life on Earth is a wonderful, blessed interconnectedness reflecting the cruciform image of God.

The Network of Christ

MacFarlane suggests history is better seen “as a network branching and cojoining in many directions” rather than a forward-flying arrow. This aligns with viewing history not as linear but as the retelling of a complex network of connections—connections ultimately centered on the crucified Christ. We are members of one single human being who happens to be the creator of the universe—a human being described in the most unexpected way: crucified.

The Living Universe and the Blood of Christ

MacFarlane notes that “not only humans, animals, and trees are alive but so too are mountains, boulders, winds, and fire,” echoing the biblical image of all creation crying out in praise. All creation contains a piece of what describes God—his incomprehensibly ugly yet beautiful, shameful yet triumphant condition on Calvary.

The legend of the Holy Grail containing Christ’s blood locked behind eleven separate strong boxes becomes almost comical when we realize you cannot contain the blood of Christ, for contained within his blood is the life of the universe. His body and blood aren’t located somewhere specific but are found everywhere, filling all things with the enigma of eternal life and eternal death.

Memory Sites and Beautiful Terror

“Memory sites are places in a landscape where the meanings of history are most actively created and contested.” Golgotha is the ultimate memory site—where the meaning of all history was manifested and has been hotly contested ever since. The cross produces dissonance, “a landscape that enchants in the present but has been a sight of violence in the past.” It has become decorative in our age, yet in its dark history of violence lies our future life and hope.

Describing a moulin—a deep glacial shaft—MacFarlane calls it “surely the most beautiful and frightening space into which I have ever looked.” This beauty combined with terror perfectly describes the cross: simultaneously the most terrifying and beautiful reality conceivable.

The word “hell” means “underworld” but also “to cover or to save”—seemingly contradictory meanings that find resolution in Christ. When elevated on the cross, Jesus was indeed in hell, the place of God’s wrath, but this was simultaneously the hour of his glory, a throne from which he rules and saves. Heaven and hell aren’t as opposite as we think, for on Good Friday, Jesus experienced both conditions simultaneously.

The Sign of Jonah

The Greek word for “sign,” sema, is also the word for “grave”—a linguistic connection illuminating Jesus’s statement that no sign would be given except “the sign of Jonah.” The resurrection of a crucified God who ascends to fill all things is the one sign pointing to God’s identity.

MacFarlane concludes that “people are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature: something to fear and something to love.” The cross embodies this duality perfectly—the image of God’s love and the cup from which Jesus asked to be spared. It is simultaneously the object of divine desire and divine dread, the pivotal point around which all creation and all time revolve, the foundation of collaboration in building our next home.

Through MacFarlane’s exploration of the underland, we discover a profound reflection of the central Christian paradox: in descent we find ascent, in darkness we find light, in death we find life, and in the crucified Christ we find the meaning that unites all things above and below.