Why does it make sense to us that God judges based on the theology someone professes? That is, why have we decided that what theological teachings we profess to believe are more important to God than whether or not we love or how we live? It's pretty clear from the testimony of Scripture that the God who is described and describes Himself in the pages therein is far more concerned with how we treat one another, how we love, and how we live our lives than with what we think He is or whether or not the Earth is young or old. Even Jesus taught explicitly that the final judgment would be based on how we treat the "least of these," the poor, the hungry, the foreigner, the sick, the prisoner, and so on. In the Scriptures, Widows and Orphans are high on the list of God's priorities while whether you're trinitarian or unitarian is not. So, given what God's M.O. actually is, why does it somehow make sense to us, even when He explicitly says otherwise, that "believing" a specific creed is the standard by which salvation is granted?
The religions which we have constructed make no sense given who God has revealed Himself to be if you really sit down and think about them. Even the word "believe" isn't really the right translation for the word in Greek which all of this rests on. The better translation for Koine Greek is "trust," and that's a very different shade of meaning from just "believe." You can "believe" a certain set of facts, or at least you can say you do, or you can "trust" those facts. You can say you believe in Jesus Christ, or you can put your trust in Him. You can give mental assent to the truth of what He taught, or you can trust Him and do it. To actually conform to the conditions of the verb in Greek, you have to actually put your trust in Him enough to live as He taught.
And what did He teach? In a nutshell, to love and be love for everyone. To forgive, turn the other cheek, not judge, go the extra mile, do good to those who hate you, and do to others what you want them to do to you.
Here's another question, why have we decided that our salvation only has to do with the afterlife when Jesus explicitly said and preached that the Kingdom of Heaven is right here and right now, so close as to be touchable? He explicitly said that the Kingdom of God is inside of you. Nowhere in the New Testament is the deliverance which comes through Jesus Christ ever described as only pertaining to the afterlife, if it pertains to the afterlife at all. The writings of Paul in particular describe the effects of this deliverance or salvation as being in the immediate present and this life, not the great by and by.
The truth is that I do know where these things come from. They come from medieval theologians in the dark ages trying to make things more comfortable for those wealthy and powerful rather than actually adhering to the discipleship which Jesus taught, and the Kingdom of Heaven which He and His apostles described. Because as Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven isn't in the afterlife, and it's not a metaphor for getting into the good place when you die. It's right here and right now inside of you. It's disengaging from your own malfunctioning flesh and coming under the control of, cooperating with, the Spirit of Christ already inside of you. It's returning to being the image of God just as He was the genuine image of God. It's submitting to Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, acting and speaking through you just as He submitted to the God and Father acting and speaking through Him.
God doesn't care one whit about how you think the mechanics of the spiritual world work. No matter what, we're all wrong on that count anyway in some way. What He has always cared about is restoring us to being His image in the here and now, and that image is being love for all those around us and especially the person right next to us. This is what is most important to Him, how we treat each other no matter who "each other" is. That is, how we love.
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