Do you believe in the existence of things that are beyond your awareness?   I don't know.  There are certainly things that I will never be aware of, but what could a "thing" be that is beyond comprehension?

You don't worship a First Cause. You worship a being that can be influenced by worship.This oscillation between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic deities is something that I have experienced many times in my lifetime of debating with Christians and others of faith over the nature of religious belief.  It is a pretty good defense mechanism for a largely untenable belief.

Your arguement would look less like a temper tantrum if you didn't seem to be changing your statement's intended audience in one huge condensed paragraph. Try structuring it better next time.

Most who debate the nature of God will dismiss any suggestion that God is male, yet the male imagery permeates scripture and religious language.  That has been my impression for many years now.  It allows for the have-cake-and-eat-it oscillation between person-like and essence-like God.

The Bishop of Woolwich will disturb most of us Christian laymen less than he anticipates.  We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven.  We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time.  There is something about this in Gibbon.  I have never met any adult who replaced 'God up there' by 'God out there' in the sense 'spatially external to the universe.'  If I said God is 'outside' or 'beyond' space-time, I should mean 'as Shakespeare is outside The Tempest'; ie, its scenes and persons do not exhaust his being.  We have always thought of God as being not only 'in' 'above', but also 'below' us:  as the depth of ground.  We can imaginatively speak of Father 'in heaven' yet also of the everlasting arms that are 'beneath'.  We do not understand why the Bishop is so anxious to canonize the one image and forbid the other.  We admit his freedom to use which he prefers.  We claim our freedom to use both.

His view of Jesus as a 'window' seems wholly orthodox ('he that hath seen me hath seen the Father').  Perhaps the real novelty is in the Bishop's doctrine about God.  But we can't be certain, for here he is very obscure.  He draws a sharp distinction between asking 'Does God exist as a person?' and asking whether ultimate reality is personal.  But surely he who says yes to the second question has said yes to the first?  Any entity describable without gross abuse of language as God must be ultimate reality, and if ultimate reality is personal, then God is personal.  Does the Bishop mean that something which is not 'a person' could yet be 'personal'?  Even this could be managed if 'not a person' were taken to mean 'a person and more' - as is provided for by the doctrine of the Trinity.  But the Bishop does not mention this.

Thus, though sometimes puzzled, I am not shocked by his article.  His heart, though perhaps in some danger of bigotry, is in the right place.  If he has failed to communicate why the things he is saying move him so deeply as they obviously do, this may be primarily a literary failure.  If I were briefed to defend his position I should say 'The image of the Earth-Mother gets in something which that of the Sky-Father leaves out.  Religions of the Earth-Mother have hitherto been spiritually inferior to those of the Sky-Father, but perhaps it is now time to readmit some of their elements.'  I shouldn't believe it very strongly, but some sort of case could be made out.