"God has no gender, he is not like a man or a woman. ... He is not a body, not a person, not a being,..."

in summary, he is an it.

"The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are quite obviously mythic in nature and not to be taken literally or historically."
Why not? How do you know the Greeks and Romans didn't take the story of Leda and the Swan quite literally?
I've always been curious to know when it was that Humans managed to put together the cause (procreation) with the effect, 9 months later.
As I've pointed out before, in an age when women were stoned to death for adultery, I'm bloody certain virgin births weren't rare.
Sells, I found your second paragraph totally at odds with your first paragraph.
For a brief moment, I thought I could agree with you.

Sells,

I agree with you that God is “not a body, not a person, not a being”. I agree that “the objectification of God” is an error. And, as I tried to point out earlier, neither egalitarianism nor any other ideology determined my conviction that God comprises both the masculine and feminine. My concern is not with gender: that’s a linguistic concept. Nor am I worrying about sexuality: that’s a biological concept.

God embraces and drives, rests and acts, penetrates and receives. God is dark and light, sound and silence, linear and convoluted, vertical and horizontal…In a nutshell, God is both feminine and masculine. This polarity is a dynamic reality in which we find God. This is not a “petty consideration”.

If one acknowledges only the masculine aspect of God this is projected in one’s interactions with other people and the ecosystem. Manifestations of the feminine are devalued. I have to agree with waterboy that this has been the source of so much injustice and misery within the Church for centuries.

As I write I begin to think that perhaps I should, after all, be more concerned about the pronouns I use for God.

You say “the dogma of the church is no mere tradition, it is the soul of the faith”. Dogma is not soul; it is proclaimed by hierarchical authority. I say we should be talking about the faith of the soul, rather than the soul of the faith.

Waterboy and Crabsy.
Of course I understand that the use of the Word Father for God is metaphor, but most of language is metaphor, that does not give us permission to change it as we see fit. I would say that the metaphor is essential and when we change it we lose something of its structure, hence my reference to trinitarian theology.
I disagree with Waterboy's trashing of the creeds. Most things have been put to bad uses, that is not an excuse for ditching them. If we did that we could not use the word God. My sole aim is to preserve the essentials of Christian theology that have been so much under attack in the modern period. The solution to this attack is not to jettison the bits that cause consternation but to tease out what place they hold in the structure of Christian theology.
Surely the present malaise of the church has been produced by the attempt to aswage the criticism from a tradition that was formed in the Enlightenment and which does not recognize how theology functions.
Throwing out the creeds because they have been used in destructive ways must leave the church without any language to describe God.

Sells makes a point and perhaps a little ironically would agree with the "impossible" Tillich. As Sells states, “He is not a body, not a person, not a being, he is pure attribute”, Tillich would so enjoin, "If you start with the question whether God does or does not exist, you can never reach Him; and if you assert that He does exist, you can reach Him even less than if you assert that he does not exist.”

That gender springs from the very deepest metaphysical roots one can imagine invokes the interaction between the Creator and the Creation. A masculine spirituality can focus on a transcendent (or mystical) Godhead, God the Father in the Heavens, and a feminine spirituality conversely focuses on God the Mother on Earth, or immanent (i.e. inherent in all of the universe) Godhead. This embrace incorporates both genders and focuses on God within. God transcends the human distinction between the sexes [God the Androgyne] – as also stated within Catholic teaching.

That God can fully and equally embrace both masculinity and femininity was more than inferred by the council of Toledo (675 A.D), which declared: "the Son is begotten or born (genitus vel natus) not from nothing, nor from any substance, but from the maternal womb of the Father (de utero Patris), that is, from his being." Jürgen Moltmann noted that the Christian doctrine on the Trinity represents "a first step towards overcoming male language in the concept of God." A father who both begets and gives birth to his son is not a uniquely male father. He is a maternal father. To call God “Father” merely gives us the attribute, that he is near to us, intimately concerned with us, fond of us and that he loves us, forever maternally.

If the official liturgy of the Church continues to use the exclusively male representation of God, and therefore also the name of Father for God (instead of as an attribute), the sacred nature and absolute transcendence of God, which fundamentally affirm Judaeo-Christian tradition, will be forgotten.

Sells
There is a view that says Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis followed from a fundamental misunderstanding on Barth’s part reducing it to a form of naïve natural theology. His rejection of analogia entis was a mistake.

It seems too that we may have located your point of‘heresy’.“He is not a body,not a person, not a being, he is pure attribute as the Pauline blessing demonstrates so well.” To say that God is “pure attribute” falls somewhat short of the Church’s classical claims about the nature of God. We can only talk about God in language that is metaphorical, in images, analogies and ‘models’. As soon as we resort to propositional language such as“God is pure attribute” we move away from Jesus’ message proclaimed in images, metaphors and parables.Overtly propositional language is always a sign of ‘heresy’ (in the popular sense of that word) and always leads to‘hairesis’ in that it demands the assignment of a truth value and forces a ‘choice’ to be made. Metaphor, on the other hand, always involves a proposition whose truth value is clearly negative and whose‘truth’can therefore only be‘explored’ through its imagery and ‘analogy’which may proceed by‘analogia entis’.

Jesus’ use of the‘Father’image and its continuation in the creedal formulations of the Church clearly establishes it as a central metaphor of faith and an‘organising principle’of all Christian Theology. It is of such importance that, although we may use any variety of other metaphors, any ‘contradiction’ of the Father metaphor should raise questions about the usefulness of those metaphors. The Mother image, for example, contradicts the gender of the Father image and as illustrated by this thread that raises questions. In this case we all seem agreed that maleness is not the point of the Father metaphor and I would assert that ‘Mother’ is not only consistent with the organizing principle of the ‘Father’ metaphor but constitutes an entirely appropriate variation and extension on the‘loving parent’image as per my quote from Matthew.

BTW,”trashing”the creeds is not my purpose. Nor is it an historical possibility.Vigorous criticism may,however,lead to a substantial re-evaluation of their place in dogmatics.