"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." [Ephesians 2, 8-9 NKJV]
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us". [1 John 1, 8-10 NKJV]
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (emphasis mine)
You go before a judge for sentencing, and he says that you have inherited a debt of a trillion dollars. He then says he offers to wipe your slate clean. Your possible responses are:
1) I don't believe you, I don't owe any debt. (atheist)
2) I believe I owe this debt, but I reject your offer. (demons)
3) I believe I owe this debt, but I will pay it myself. (good works)
4) I believe I owe this debt, and I am eternally grateful that you have paid it for me. (christians)
So your description would fall under category (3). You owe a debt of a trillion dollars and then say, hey, here's a couple hundred bucks I earned through my good deeds, we're good, right? That's a complete insult, to reject the gift, and then try to pay it back with a pittance.
The best analogy I can think of is if a husband says they love their wife, but they never help them, show affection, do anything to serve them, do they really love them? Now in marriage, love should ultimately be unconditional (to a point, all analogies fall down at some point). If a wife loves their husband freely, but the husband says they return the love but do nothing to show it, what can we infer about his love?
The notion that people should do good for its own sake doesn't really change the fact that it's the ticket for Catholicism. Conversely in, say, Calvinism nothing you do can guarantee Salvation.
And the theologians i've read who seem the most on point explicitly reject the transactionalist nature of payment-demanding as inhuman and a fundamental misunderstanding of the game.
i'm on board with universal reconciliation, so "pie in the sky when you die" never did it for me anyway, but to be clear i'm also not describing "some happier future state" in my top post as anything other than improvement for our lives as we know them right now on this planet.
the kingdom of god is not heaven after you die. it’s much more to do with the homeless woman on the street outside your house right this instant.
and i’m a boring mainline protestant!
Quite a few religions will regard the present moment as such (Buddhism, Judaism), but not all propose an afterlife. Whether all the world is the Kingdom, by definition Heaven is too.
The weight of messaging and interpretation shifts with the times to capitalize on the fact that people are more life-affirming when times are good, and if broadly there's toil and suffering, well, hope for peace in the next life.
I think it's disingenuous to ignore the distinction. You can quibble about what-its-all-about, but in accordance with the dogma there's either afterlife or there isn't, and that knowledge is so prominent in popular culture that non-believers know it, people from other cultures know it.
The mistake that rather a lot of my evangelical cousins make (i am not one) is that, to paraphrase James, they tend to be so focused on the life to come and have such a crabbed interpretation of "staying unblemished by the world" that they entirely forget -- or worse, regard as something that blemishes you -- the "visiting the widows and orphans in their distress" clause. And that just won't do.