The good confession, from Matthew 16:16, is the Disciples' membership test and the entirety of their doctrinal requirement. It was chosen deliberately in the nineteenth century as the shortest possible statement that could be drawn directly from the text without adding a word of human construction, and it survives unchanged. In practice this means a Disciples congregation can contain people with radically different beliefs about the atonement, biblical authority, or the resurrection, all in full membership, and that the denomination has no instrument for saying otherwise. Critics inside the tradition argue this has emptied it; defenders point out that it is the founding principle rather than a modern drift, and that Thomas Campbell wrote it in 1809.