If "scripture" just is what has been accepted by the Church, then isn't the apocrypha scripture as well?

That is a sharp question, and it exposes a real weakness in a popular Protestant slogan. If "the church decided" is the whole story, then the church's later decisions about the deuterocanonical books count too, and the argument cuts against the person making it.

1. The word 'church' is doing two jobs. For the Old Testament, the relevant community is not the later Christian church but Israel, to whom the oracles of God were entrusted (Romans 3:2). The question about the apocrypha is what the Jewish community recognized as its Scriptures, not what a fourth-century council preferred. Mixing the two communities is the equivocation at the center of the objection.

2. Those books were never in the Hebrew Bible. The deuterocanonical books appear in the Greek Septuagint tradition but not in the Hebrew canon the apostles read. That is the decisive historical point, and it holds whatever later councils decided. It does not make the books worthless; it makes them something other than the Hebrew Scriptures.

3. The early Jewish witnesses agree. Josephus, writing in the first century, counts the Jewish Scriptures as twenty-two books and denies that later works carry equal authority. Fourth Ezra and the rabbinic tradition draw the same line. The old story that a council at Jamnia fixed the canon is oversimplified, and honest readers should say so, but the direction of the evidence is consistent.

4. The New Testament does not cite them as Scripture. Jesus and the apostles quote the Old Testament constantly, and the apocryphal books are not among the citations. Concede the limits: there are echoes, Hebrews 11 resembles 2 Maccabees, and Jude quotes 1 Enoch, which no one counts as canonical. Citation practice is suggestive evidence, not a canon list.

5. Jerome drew the same distinction. The greatest biblical scholar of the early church classified the disputed books as 'ecclesiastical' rather than canonical, read for edification but not for establishing doctrine. He was overruled in practice, and the question stayed open in the West until Trent in the sixteenth century. That is a long ambiguity, not a settled consensus.

6. Recognition is not creation. Michael Kruger's argument is that the church did not authorize books that were otherwise merely human documents; it recognized books that already carried divine authority. A jeweler's assay does not manufacture the diamond. The church's role was discernment, and discernment can be right or wrong without being creative.

7. The objection's own principle collapses. If reception by a church makes a book Scripture, then the Ethiopic canon with its eighty-one books, the Syriac tradition, and the Tridentine list each create a different Scripture, and there is no fact of the matter to be right about. The objection assumes a very high view of the church's authority, which is precisely the thing it wants to use as a weapon.

8. The real issue is authority, not list-making. If Scripture is the church's product, it cannot judge the church; the church judges it. But the prophets and apostles spoke with authority before anyone voted on their books, and Paul can appeal to his hearers' Scriptures as a standard above them (2 Timothy 3:16). A canon that is merely ratified is a canon that can be revised.

9. Christians genuinely disagree here. Catholic and Orthodox readers include these books in their canon; Protestants do not; both traditions read them with profit. The disagreement is about the extent of the canon, and it was not settled in the first century. Anyone who tells you the question is obvious is skipping the history.

10. Jesus treated the Scriptures as finished. He refers to the Scriptures as the word of God that cannot be broken (John 10:35), and he sums them up as the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms (Luke 24:44). He assumes a body of writings already in place, not one still being assembled around him.

So the objection lands against a slogan, not against the historic position. The canon was received before it was ratified, and the apocrypha were disputed long before anyone thought to settle it by decree.

Sources: Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited; Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament; Josephus, Against Apion; Jerome, Prologue to the Vulgate.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!