I'm wondering if the assertion of Christ's divinity arose as a natural theological progression from a simple early practice of worshipping Christ. It appears that none of the early controversies even centered on the worship of Christ (to my knowledge), but only on the nature of Christ. Even the Arians worshipped Christ, as did Russellites/Watchtower adherents until the 1950s.
I think the question of whether or not Christ is to be elevated to the point of worship has more practical significance to a believer than a theological explanation about his nature and relation to the Father.
Can anyone provide any historical insight on this?
So we have to imagine Pliny seated [as] a Roman magistrate all decked out in his finery, enthroned in the tribunal with his guards and his bailiffs and his courtiers around him, and before him stand these Christians and Pliny can't figure out who they are or why they're there and he has to ask. Now what he's told is that apparently they've done something that gets their neighbors mad at them. The neighbors have complained that the temples are empty and no one's buying certain things for the gods... and they're Christians, and so somehow or another, Pliny is forced to deal with this as a criminal matter, as a legal issue in a way that he could not have anticipated earlier. Now what he does is he begins to interrogate them. He says he asks questions of them and then he even tortures some members of the Christian group, some slave women whom he titles "deaconesses" and under torture tries to get them to admit to some of the crimes that he thinks must be associated with this group. In the process he finds that in fact it's a fairly innocuous group.... He says, "I discovered nothing more than an innocuous superstition. They don't really do all that much. They meet before daybreak. They sing hymns antiphonally and they worship Christ as if he were a god," and then he says, "They take an oath, but not an oath to do anything bad, rather an oath only to be good. Not to defraud people. Not to do anything evil," and so on, and so clearly Pliny is baffled a bit about what it is that constitutes their crime, but ultimately he still comes to the conclusion that he must execute some of them.