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"We don't know what they did after the councils. What we do know is the church lost its vitality and for the next 800 years or so nothing of significance came out of the church which is indicative of institutionalization."

Where does this idea come from?!!!!!!!! Some of the greatest theology in The Church developed after the 7th Ecumenical Council and before the Great Schism, even after the Great Schism. I don't want to waste the bandwidth to outline here what the great theologians of the East, and for that matter the West, wrote after that council but I assure you, The Church was anything but moribund!

I suspect that you are unfamiliar with the Eastern Fathers and like most Protestants believe that after the era of the Ecumenical Councils there was only what one now calls the Roman Catholic Church and against which your people revolted. That simply isn't true. The Church in the East has been around since Pentecost. Its history is quite different from that of The Church in the West, as one might expect. You may be interested to know that as late as the 14th century Eastern hierarchs were complaining that they couldn't go to the baker's or the shoemaker's without having to engage in a discussion of the nature of Christ or of the Trinity.

But in the East the civil/social system was different from that in the West. The Church never became a temporal power as circumstances forced on The Church in the West. When the peasants of the West were benighted grovelers scratching out an existence on some lord's manorial, feudal estate, in the East we had a glittering, educated, cosmopolitan Empire and even in the border lands, that civilization was looked to as the standard. We were the Roman Empire then, complete with an emperor. The Church could be The Church and the Empire the Empire. In the West it was feudalism with the Pope of Rome, by default, serving as the "emperor" simply to try to hold things together. Even at that, the Western Church never became moribund. Look at the light of Christianity in the British Isles up to the Norman Invasion! There are few, if any, greater beacons of Christianity than that found there in those times. Monasticism there was the equal to that found in the Desert before the Mohammedan Conquest. Not vibrant indeed!

"Monasticism there was the equal to that found in the Desert before the Mohammedan Conquest. Not vibrant indeed!"

Please explain how monasticism can be said to be vibrant when it spiritually benefited only the few while keeping the people in ignorance and superstition. It was able to protect the scriptures from the Muslim hoards but it did little to increase the literacy of the common folk so they could read the scriptures for themselves. It can be argued that there weren't the complete scriptures available but there certainly could have been portions of scriptures posted in public places for the people to read just as the laws of the realm were posted. The problem was the professionals did not trust the common folk with the Word of God or the promise that the Holy Spirit would lead them into the truth that would set them free from their sin.

I suspect that you are unfamiliar with the Eastern Fathers and like most Protestants believe that after the era of the Ecumenical Councils there was only what one now calls the Roman Catholic Church and against which your people revolted.

Most Protestants, until very recently, were never exposed to Eastern Orthodox theology, except if they travelled to an Eastern European country or knew immigrants from that country. Furthermore, while the Orthodox and Catholic theological viewpoints are quite the same, the Orthodox framework is much more Eastern and not at all like the Western mindset through which Protestants, and Catholics (I think) approach things. Without meaning offense, it is my impression that the Orthodox are much less "theological" than the West.

I could be just projecting (I do have a tendency to do that), but I never encountered anything by the Orthodox until college.