Quotes About the Fall of the Church

Quotes about the fall of the Church from throughout Christian History.

Did the Church Really Fall?

It's my opinion that the Church fell during the time of Constantine. My strongest evidence for this is the incredible difference between the history of Eusebius, written during Constantine's reign in A.D. 323, and the history of Socrates Scholasticus, written around A.D. 440. Eusebius' history concerns persecution, disputes with heretics, and great men of God; the sort of thing you'd expect in a church history. Socrates' history, covering the time after Constantine, is instead full of intrigue, violence, and stories like these.

However, that's not my only evidence. The quotes that follow are also evidence of the fall of the Church during Constantine's reign.

Please note that there was a lot leading up to this fall. I talk about those things in the section on the Nicene Era.

You can also see quotes about modern Christianity. It's May 14, 2009 as I write this, and I'm just starting that section today, but I'll include quotes both good and bad as time passes. This quote section grows overall every week.

Philip Schaff, 1875

From the time of Constantine church discipline declines; the whole Roman world having become nominally Christian, and the host of hypocritical professors [i.e., converts] multiplying beyond all control." (History of the Christian Church, vol. III, p. 8)

Justo Gonzalez, 1984

The sorry state of the church during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave impetus to various movements of reform. (The Story of Christianity, p. 342)

Tom Lee, 2009

[my note: in Constantine's time] Delivered from physical danger at the hands of the State, the Church was soon torn by theological dissension within; the almost inevitable outcome of its changed character. Having assimilated Hellenic philosophy and ethics and social forms, the Church also assumed a new frame of mind that shifted the emphasis from conduct to belief. The total contrast can be seen by comparing the Sermon on the Mount, which came at the beginning, and the Nicene Creed, which finalized the initial stage of the theological process of elaboration. The former is a sermon on ethics; the latter is a dogmatic, metaphysical credo, unrelated to conduct, in which contentious ideas and surmises with no provenance in Jesus' teaching became improbable dogmas. (The Conversion of Constantine, Part 17.2, from www.catholica.com.au)