System of Christian theology that denied the complete divinity of Jesus, giving God the Father primacy over the created son Jesus. It was founded about 310 by Arius, and condemned as heretical at the Council of Nicaea in 325.
Some 17th- and 18th-century theologians held Arian views akin to those of
Unitarianism (that God is a single being, and that there is no such thing as the Trinity). In 1979 the heresy again caused concern to the Vatican in the writings of such theologians as Edouard Schillebeeckx of the Netherlands.
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