Arianism was a heresy that denied the true and full divinity of Christ, maintaining that the Son was not co-eternal with the Father but was created by the Father as an instrument for God's purpose in creation and salvation. It set the stage for the great controversy which enabled the Church to finally hammer out a robust doctrine of the Trinity that could stand up to the test of Scriptures. The heresy derived its name from Arius.
Arius was a presbyter in the church in Alexandria, Egypt. He began to preach his heresy sometime around 319 in a dispute between him and his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. Though Arius' teaching was condemned by the Council of Nicea in 325, the controversy dragged on for many years when Arius' chief opponent was the young Athanasius, a deacon from Alexandria, whose dogged efforts at hammering out a biblical Christology eventually triumphed in the 4thCent. The decision of the Council of Nicea on the matter was reaffirmed by the Council of Constantinople in 381.
Though defected in the great church councils, arian missionary efforts found fertile grounds among the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the barbarians from the north who would over-ran western Europe (and sacking Rome in 410) in the 5th Cent. Wearing Arianism as a badge of cultural distinction from the Catholics, they ruled much of the Iberian peninsula were for more than a century until they were pursuaded to embrace Rome's spiritual oversight. In 493, in fact, The Ostrogoth leader Theodoric siezed the city of Ravenna (in north-eastern modern Italy) and made it a center of Arian Christianity (it had "the grandest church building ever built in Italy for a non-Catholic version of the Christian faith," a church which still stands today and is called Sant' Appollinare Nuovo) that survived for half a century until the city was retaken by Byzantine forces. There hung for a time over western Europe, therefore, the possibility that she could have taken the path of Arianism instead of Nicean Catholicism.
The best modern-day examples of proponents of the Arians heresy are the Jehowah Witnesses. Islam is, of course, also stringently Arian in its view of Jesus.
You may wish to read
Louis Berkhof's entry on the Doctrine of the Trinity in The History of Christian Doctrines, first published in 1937.
Further Reading:
Robert Gregg and Dennis Groh, Early Arianism: A View of Salvation. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981.
R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318-381. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005.
Resources:
Bruce Ware, Systematic Theology. Lecture 13: The Trinity. BiblicalTraining.org.
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Anthony McRoy, "The Theology of Arius," Foundations 59 (May 2008): 17-28.
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Maurice C. Burrell, "Twentieth Century Arianism: An Examination of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ held by Jehovah's Witnesses," The Churchman 80.2 (Summer 1966): 130-139.
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