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" why do you suppose they didn't just close up shop and set up independent protestant type assemblies right then if they had been so very wrong in their ecclesiology for the previous 400 years?"

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. If you want to drain the life out of an assembly take the power out of the hands of the people and centralize it in the hands of the professionals. Keep people ignorant of the heritage promised in the scriptures except what the professionals want them to know and you have darkness. Make them keep coming back to the professionals to insure their salvation rather than the freedom of seeking it and finding it personally by faith through the Word of God.

When light finally breaks and people can understand for themselves their inheritance, surely there will be excesses, but there will also be be truth that saves and empowers them to be the stewards of the promises given to them and to those they are responsible for. The church was never meant for the professionals. It was meant for the people to personally know their God and in knowing to do great deeds.

The church was never meant for the professionals. It was meant for the people to personally know their God

Here is one professional charged with the sheep:

When therefore they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter: Simon son of John, lovest thou me more than these? He saith to him: Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. He saith to him: Feed my lambs. He saith to him again: Simon, son of John, lovest thou me? He saith to him: Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. He saith to him: Feed my lambs. He said to him the third time: Simon, son of John, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved, because he had said to him the third time: Lovest thou me? And he said to him: Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee. He said to him: Feed my sheep. (John 21:15-17)

And this is what that professional thought of finding salvation "personally".

Understanding this first, that no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation. (2 Peter 1:20)

Make them keep coming back to the professionals to insure their salvation rather than the freedom of seeking it and finding it personally by faith through the Word of God.

That really hit home. The professionals engender a tyranny of false compunction that can paralyze.

When light finally breaks and people can understand for themselves their inheritance, surely there will be excesses, but there will also be be truth that saves and empowers them to be the stewards of the promises given to them and to those they are responsible for. The church was never meant for the professionals. It was meant for the people to personally know their God and in knowing to do great deeds.

That also hit home. Beautifully put.

"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!