Definition (house-style)
The immanent Trinity (also: ontological Trinity, essential Trinity) describes the relations of the three divine Persons to one another — independently of creation, salvation history, and their relation to humanity. While the economic Trinity describes God in his outward action (ad extra), the immanent Trinity attempts to describe how Father, Son, and Spirit relate to one another “in themselves” (ad intra) — prior to and apart from creation. This distinction is classically theological; Rahner’s Rule states: “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.”
The authors in this corpus almost unanimously avoid the immanent Trinity. The concept functions in this corpus primarily as a lacuna term: its absence is theologically significant — all three authors are exclusively interested in the triune God as he reveals himself and dispenses himself in salvation history.
Author variants
Jones
Jones does not address the immanent Trinity explicitly. His Trinitarian thinking is entirely salvation-historical: the Father is the final destination of the cosmic redemptive plan (1Cor. 15:24-28), but Jones does not speak about the inner relations of the Trinity prior to or apart from salvation history. In his Prolegomena, Jones emphasizes that God is sovereign and that his ways cannot be fully grasped by human minds — implying that the immanent relations of the Trinity lie beyond systematic knowledge claims.
Nee/Lee
Nee/Lee explicitly leave the immanent Trinity aside: their Trinitarian interest is functional and soteriological. The question of how Father, Son, and Spirit relate to one another apart from creation or humanity is not raised:
“The goal of the divine economy is to dispense the Triune God in one Spirit into our human spirit.”
[Nee/Lee, The Economy of God, Ch. 1]
Nee/Lee’s Trinitarian theology is entirely oriented toward the outward direction (ad extra): Father as source, Son as expression, Spirit as transmission — a movement that terminates in the believer, not in the immanent relations of the Godhead.
Warnock
Warnock does not work with classical Trinitarian categories. The distinction between economic and immanent Trinity is foreign to his framework; his Trinitarian thinking is functionally oriented toward the indwelling of the Father in the Son and the role of the Spirit as the bearer of Christ’s blood. He acknowledges the “mystery of the three-in-one” but regards it as not amenable to systematic development: “the mystery of the Three-in-One I do not understand, I confess.”
[Warnock, The Hyssop that Springeth Out of the Wall, hyssop2.html]