Theodicy and Black Theological Anthropology in James Cone’s Theological Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article’s underlying objective is to reassess James H. Cone’s theological vision and meaning, with a special interest in his theological anthropology, Christology, and his efforts to articulate cogently an adequate response to the crisis of black theodicy in the United States. Cone’s theological identity is framed within the discourse of the greater African American intellectual (radical) tradition, the Black Consciousness movement, as well as within the historical trajectories of the crisis of American white theology and the segregated white Church. While Cone’s theological corpus is associated with the emergence of a constructive theology of emancipation in the Americas, his theological knowledge and political theology evoked the American democratic tradition and ideals. Cone insisted that African Americans should also be beneficiaries of the promises of democracy and the nation’s future possibilities. Yet Cone, as a fierce critic of the American democracy and white supremacy, was not optimistic about the willingness of the American government to provide liberative political interventions to black theodicy and suffering; rather, he sought an alternative, one that is abstract and theoretical but experimental and psychological: the cross of Christ as a possible solution to the crisis of black theodicy. Hence, Cone could develop a Christology of appropriation to deal symbolically with the burden of black history of suffering and pain in relation to the historic suffering and agony of Jesus Christ. For Cone, the theological is implicated in the political and the cultural; while the political is not cathartic, the theological may provide a mental relief to black folk.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".