Your Body Is Holy: The Christian Understanding of Sex, by Paul Tyson. Wipf & Stock, 2025, 83 pages, $33.00.

This short work seeks to explain and defend a traditional Christian sexual ethic, especially to young people who have grown up imbibing a sexual ethos that makes the Christian view entirely foreign. Paul Tyson, an Australian scholar, has succeeded in many respects. His defense of traditional Christian sexual morality is unapologetic, his writing is generally clear and winsome, and he offers concise yet informed evaluations of several major contemporary challenges to Christian sexual ethics. Nevertheless, a couple of issues likely prevent this book from being the ideal work for Reformed Christians to give to sexually confused young people.

Tyson divides his book of merely seventy-nine pages into twelve short chapters. In the first four chapters, Tyson describes the contemporary context in which the Sexual Revolution emerged, and he introduces his general approach to ethics. He distinguishes the vertical and the horizontal: The former concerns “worship” and humans’ relationship to God while the latter concerns “ethics” and humans’ relationship to each other, corresponding to the first four and last six commandments of the Decalogue, respectively. Tyson also argues that the vertical defines the horizontal (15), which makes ethics a “sub-species” of the vertical (19) and gives the horizontal a “vertical dimension” (14). This Christian understanding is thus in conflict with the predominant contemporary view that the “secular” is entirely distinct from religious matters, the latter of which should be kept private (16–17).

Tyson turns specifically to sexual issues in the next four chapters. He writes about the importance of the body, especially in light of the image of God, and argues that sexual relations should take place only within heterosexual marriage. He includes a discussion of Ephesians 5:21–33, affirming its teaching about husbands’ self-sacrificial love for their wives and wives’ submission to their husbands. Tyson also refutes claims by contemporary scholars that Paul directed his negative statements about homosexuality only against relationships marked by power and age inequality, not against loving and consensual homosexual relationships, which Paul allegedly knew nothing about.

The final chapters focus on three contemporary threats to Christian sexual morality: pornography, feminism, and queer theory (especially with respect to transgenderism). Tyson’s opposition to pornography and transgenderism is clear and follows logically from his previous arguments. The chapter on feminism is the longest in the book. Although Tyson believes that Christians can be allies with some feminists on some issues (for example, with feminists who oppose transgenderism as harmful to females), he concludes that there is no coherent Christian feminism.

As noted above, there is much to appreciate in this book. All adherents of traditional Christian sexual ethics will appreciate the straightforward, unashamed, and concise way in which Tyson defends it. I have a couple of minor disappointments in the book, but they are not crucial to Tyson’s overall argument and are rather easy to overlook. But two other issues are bigger problems since they appear pervasively in the work.

The first concerns the terms “sacred” and “holy,” which Tyson uses interchangeably. Throughout the book, he labels the body, sexuality, sex, marriage, and humans as holy. It would take a much longer review to document how Tyson describes what makes something sacred. He is not precise or consistent. I believe it is fair to say, in the big picture, that Tyson thinks of the holy as that which is related to God and under his authority. But this is hardly a satisfactory way to capture what Scripture means by the word holy. Biblical teaching on holiness is a complex matter, but it is at least clear that Scripture consistently distinguishes the holy from the non-holy. In Tyson’s understanding, however, everything must be holy, or at least every good thing, since everything is related to God and his authority. In Scripture, however, the holy is always relative to what is not holy or less holy. And what is not holy is not necessarily bad. Westminster Larger Catechism 169 captures this. We regard the Lord’s Supper as holy—as a sacrament—but only because the bread and wine are “set apart . . . from common use.” The bread and wine were not bad before their consecration, just good in a non-holy way.

Perhaps Reformed readers could overlook this issue, although I do not believe the pervasive misuse of a crucial biblical category is a minor problem. But a related issue that is even more problematic is Tyson’s repeated description of sex and sexuality as “sacramental.” When first introducing this idea, he defines a sacrament as a “sacred physical reality” (25). In this light, “Christian marriage is the sacrament that defines and protects the holy meaning of human sexuality” (26). Here he is crystal clear that this is essential to Christian sexual ethics. Those who reject the sacramental view of marriage “do not have a Christian understanding of the meaning of human sexuality” (26). In a footnote, Tyson speaks of marriage as “one of the seven traditional sacraments of the Christian Church,” and also speaks of “some Protestant churches in the Zwinglian and non-conformist traditions” that have “abandoned traditional sacramental theology.” This “rejection of sacramental theology” is “highly problematic” (26, n.3). Tyson does not identify in this work what his ecclesiastical affiliation is (nor could a leading AI service tell me what it is). He writes in at least one place in the book as though he is not a Roman Catholic. I surmise from Tyson’s theological and philosophical views expressed here and elsewhere that he may be an Anglo-Catholic in the mode of the Radical Orthodoxy movement. In any case, Tyson writes here as though the Reformed tradition does not exist. Non-Zwinglian Reformed theologians (that is, most Reformed theologians) clearly did not “abandon” or “reject” sacramental theology, yet they adamantly denied that marriage is a sacrament, for compelling biblical reasons. From this point on in his book, however, Tyson repeatedly describes sex and marriage in “sacramental” terms.

In the end, from a Reformed perspective, this is a book with much good material alongside serious flaws. Reformed ministers and elders may find this work useful in helping them to think through issues of sexual ethics and to be better equipped to engage contemporary youth who are terribly confused about sexuality. But Reformed ministers and elders probably will not want to make this the book they give to those young people themselves.

David VanDrunen is Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California, Escondido, California. He is a member of the Committee on Christian Education. Ordained Servant Online, June, 2026