Somehow, right at the beginning of the church, the exclusive loyalty and worship demanded by God alone in the Old Testament was assumed to be upheld and not violated by worship offered to Jesus. For all the diversity we can discover in early Christian communities — and it is great — on this point they are remarkably united. Moreover, this commitment to worshiping Jesus is present and fully formed from the beginning, or at least from as early as we can know. The church knew from its birth, it seems, that offering worship to Jesus is not incompatible with exclusive loyalty to God. The doctrine of the Trinity is a set of conceptual distinctions and definitions that offer a theological account of the divine life that made sense of these primitive practices of worship.
Holmes, Stephen R., “Classical Trinity: Evangelical Perspective,” in Jason S. Sexton (ed), Two Views on the Doctrine of the Trinity (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology) (p. 33). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
