Definition (house-style)
Co-inherence (from Latin co-inhaerere: to dwell together, to mutually contain) refers in Trinitarian context to the mutual containing of the divine Persons in one another: the Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father, the Spirit is in both — not as mingling (modalism) but as distinct Persons mutually interpenetrating. The concept is functionally equivalent to perichoresis but is used in this corpus primarily by Nee/Lee as a defensive concept against the modalism charge. Outside this corpus, the term is rarely used in this precise technical sense; the classical term is perichoresis.
Author variants
Nee/Lee
Nee/Lee use co-inherence to clarify that their strongly unitarian-sounding Trinitarian language does not amount to modalism. The three Persons are co-inherent: they mutually contain and interpenetrate one another, while remaining maintained as distinct Persons:
“The Father is in the Son, and the Son with all His seven bountiful elements is in the Spirit. When this bountiful Holy Spirit comes into us, the Godhead is then dispensed into us.”
[Nee/Lee, The Economy of God, Ch. 1]
Co-inherence in Nee/Lee’s usage is functionally equivalent to perichoresis, but asymmetric: the containing proceeds directionally (Father→Son→Spirit), in line with the economic Trinity, rather than as the full symmetric mutual indwelling of classical Trinitarian theology. This distinction is theologically significant: in classical perichoresis, each Person fully contains the other two — in Nee/Lee the containing is linear and soteriologically oriented toward the dispensing of the Trinity into the believer. Co-inherence thus functions in Nee/Lee as a defensive position rather than as an independent Trinitarian theory.