From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

Yahweh began as a highly personalized deity with passionate human likes and dislikes. Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than  human. Thus personalism has been an important and – for many – indispensable stage of religious and moral development….

Yet a personal God can be a grave liability.  He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires.  We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.  When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel.  A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable.  The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores.  A personal God can be dangerous, therefore.  Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be.  Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize.  It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development.  The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.