This is, however, very much an anti-mystical interpretation of Scripture that strips out the Divine-human relation
What you see as a "striping out" I see as a re-centering. You only need to change your lens of classical, scholastic metaphysics.
Concerning God and spiritual realities, the way of interiority alone exists. The starting point is the self. A purely rationalist psychological model would end with the self. This path begins with the self in order to journey to God.
Self-knowledge is the gate, the Manifestation of God is the path, and God is the final destination. This final destination is infinite with endless spiritual progress.
With that being said, the Baha'i teachings do not strip out the Divine-human relation. They redefine and safeguard it from the projections of human imagination.
The Divine-human relation is made real and accessible through the Manifestation of God. The Divine-human relation is the relationship between humanity and this Manifestation.
As Abu’l-Fadl clarifies:
"All that whereby God's essence is described, and everything which is added to and rests upon God - including such attributes as glory, grandeur, power, might, knowledge, wisdom, will, volition, and so on - refer, in reality, to the Manifestation of His Cause.”
Your lens makes this appear as follows: "God is irrelevant." However, in my lens it makes God accessible. Without this link - the Manifestation of God - all you have is either human imagination or unknowability.
– it strips out everything Christ was actually talking about –
No, it doesn’t. Only from a certain lens would that be true.
and replaces it with a rationalist psychological model in which 'God' and 'Christ' as such are irrelevant.
No, it doesn’t.
What is irrelevant is the human attempt at theological speculation about God's essence.
The focus has shifted.
We are no longer in the abstract ontology of classical theologians.
We are now in the lived reality of consciousness, which is the realm where God's attributes are expressed and perceived. You see God and Christ becoming irrelevant, but I see them being understood in a way that is relevant to the spiritual transformation of both the individual and society.
