Salvation - resurrected eternal life in heaven - should be the direction of our life, not its goal.
A direction provides a context and perspective for living. We know where we are going, we know we are going there - and we live in that environment of expectation.
This direction shapes Christian life.
But when salvation is instead understood as the goal of our life; then Christianity gets to be something like a politician trying to get elected, or studying for a scholarship examination, or winning a court case.
We are already in God's family - it's a matter of recognizing that family as good, a matter of affiliating with our family (similar to the choice that most adolescents are confronted with). A matter of affiliating our purposes with those of our divine family; and therefore not affiliating our purposes with others who have chosen to reject (and attack?) that divine family.
Christian life isn't about believing and doing a "million" things derived from scripture, nor about obeying a million instructions from a church.
It is (or should be) about aligning ourselves with a few, and simple, understandings of reality.
All this is part of weaning our-selves off the expectation that our personal faith ought to satisfy some external this-worldly arbiter; I mean the strange but prevalent notion that "what matters" is justifying ourselves to "other people" - (or to what we infer about other people, since we seldom really know with surety).
It often seems to me that the greatest but most misguided act of faith is in the superior-to-ourselves honesty, competence and motivations of "other people" - whether those people are current or past, whether written or embodied in a bureaucracy.
I see this as an attempted denial of ultimate personal responsibility for our own Christian understanding, faith and life; and I regard protestations that this deference to "other people" is due to the virtue of humility, to be nearly always a false evasion (as evidenced by their gross - ahem - "lack of humility" in all other respects!).
But in the end this issue of humility just kicks the can; since understanding the nature, role and importance of humility is yet another issue about which we must decide whether to take personal responsibility, or to submit to the Superior wisdom) of other-people...
And then: how can we (how actually do we) discern which other-people are of superior wisdom to ourselves? If we answer in terms of a consensus of history; then which consensus?
And why should consensus be wiser than the individual - who says, and is it right that those who say it must be believed?
Wherever we squirm, we will find that ultimately everything has been underpinned by our own personal decision and choices. I think we will also find that the reality of our solid faith is much much simpler than the millions upon millions of explanations and rules and practices that are supposedly "Christianity" - and which we have actually derived by subordinating our personal responsibility to a wide range of "other people" - about whose competence, nature and intent we are essentially ignorant.
