>>“In other words, these councils were declaring THE WAY THINGS HAVE BEEN, not the way they wanted them to be.”
Because the concluding clause bears no necessary relationship to the opening clause. You could just as logically have said that the way things had been is just the way the councils wanted things to be. In other words the sentence is a nonsequitur, i.e., the second clause does not logically follow from the opening clause.
RE: You could just as logically have said that the way things had been is just the way the councils wanted things to be
Nope. The councils were composed of men who came from the Christian community. They could not INVENT or CHOOSE writings ( your “what the councils wanted them to be “ ) that were not considered sacred by the Christian community at large.
What they did was simply FORMALIZE what their church members already recognized for posterity.