As a general description, community-determined approaches view the canon as something that is, in some sense, established or constituted by the people — either individually or corporately — who have received these books as Scripture. Canonicity is viewed not as something inherent to any set of books, but as ‘something officially or authoritatively imposed upon certain literature.’ Thus, a ‘canon’ does not exist until there is some sort of response from the community (Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origin and Authority of the New Testament Books, 29-30).

If canon is something that is created and constituted by the community, and there is nothing inherent in these books to make them canonical, then a canon cannot exist before the community formally acts. Thus, it is not unusual for the historical-critical approach to have a fairly late date for canon and to insist on a strict semantic distinction between Scripture and canon (33).

[T]he fundamental problem with the historical-critical model is not its affirmation that the church played a role, but rather its insistence that the church played the determinative and decisive role. . . . Such an approach provides us with a merely human canon stripped of any normative or revelational authority and thereby unable to function as God’s word to his people (34-35).

[I]f one views the canon as Christians have historically understood it, namely, as the product of God’s divine covenant-making activity (as we shall discuss further below), then there is no reason to think that we should reserve the term canon to refer only to the end of the entire process . . . Indeed, from the perspective of God’s revelational activity, a canon exists s soon as the New Testament books are written — the canon is always the books God has given to the corporate church, no more, no less (38).