Radical Orthodox theologians interacted with Process Theologians at an AAR session. Milbank gave an off the cuff response to the process theologians, starting with common interests among them, which he said were greater than he expected. Among them was their common resistance to the anti-metaphysical trends of modern philosophy, particularly after Wittgenstein. Milbank suggested that Whitehead might in the end turn out to be a more important philosopher than Wittgenstein.
He summarized the anti-anti-metaphysical case by saying that those opposed to metaphysics still operate in the space of what he called “metaphysics in the bad sense,” that is, metaphysics that excludes transcendence and theology from the get-go. It still works within a scheme of univocity, which is the very definition of onto-theology (even Heidegger does, Milbank asserted). RO and Process Theology are united in their realism, their sense that the mind is conditioned by what is outside the mind, their common sense that since mind is in reality is must have access to reality and matter, and their common conclusion that philosophy cannot be reduced to language (analytic) or appearances (phenomenology).
Against Process Theology, though, Milbank argued that the process theologians cannot secure the values they want to secure - life, the event, an assault on dualism - without positing God as a transcendent, infinitely realized event. He provocatively suggested that since God is infinite, God’s being is not bounded and finished like finite beings or events, but is beyond the duality of becoming and finishing. If “the unfinished” is hypostatized, however, as Milbank sees Process theology doing, there is no way to value some shapes of change over another. There needs to be an absolute event, a Cusan coincidence of potentiality and actuality in God, if the created processes are to be truly valued. Otherwise, the process itself becomes ultimate, and the event gets lost in the flow. There must be the continual gift of being from an infinite source if we are going to account for finite being at all. In Trinitarian theology, God is reciprocity; if, as process theology suggests (to Milbank), reciprocity between God and creation is ultimate, then the process is ultimate, and reciprocity gets swallowed up in process.
During questioning, Milbank affirmed his adherence to a traditional notion of impassibility, arguing that suffering and passivity are never good in themselves, and therefore they can have no place in the life of a God who is wholly good. Tony Baker added that impassibility is necessary to account for holiness: A God who is a co-sufferer may sympathize, but Baker said such a God is incapable of transforming.