“Then that little man in Black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”
—Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth, the great African-American liberator of slaves, correctly notices that, in the Virgin Birth story in the gospels, there are no men, that is no adult male humans, no members of the privileged, dominant gender, certainly no kings or emperors, involved in the actual conception and delivery of God into the world in Jesus Christ. The only men in the story play mere secondary, supporting, or adversarial roles. But it is a matter of God — specifically God’s Holy Spirit — Ruach in Hebrew, which is feminine — cooperating with Mary, a teenaged, Jewish woman.
So when Isaiah 7:14 uses a term that the gospels understand as “virgin,” it means not only that God’s future is coming, but that it is God’s future, that is, it is not dependent on the decisions or agency of any of the powerful people in the world, nearly all of whom were men. No man would be able to claim paternity and therefore any of the credit for God’s Presence in the world. No man would be the lord of the Lord. The Messiah would not belong to any patriarchal bloodline (except that of David by adoption). God’s future comes about in spite of and in contradiction to the plans and agendas of the powerful humans who think they are in charge.
That, and not any silly literalist conjectures about what is or isn’t gynecologically miraculous, or gnosticizing attempts to make the Lord's conception supposedly "sinless," or to keep Mary "pure," or to make Jesus "unique," is why the Virgin Birth story remains an essential part of Christian faith.
—Paul+
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