Rastafari are practitioners of Rastafarianism, a religious-cultural movement that began during the 1930s. The messiah or Jah (God) of this religion and cultural movement is Haile Selassie I, the late emperor of Ethiopia. While there is very much a hermeneutic of suspicion within the Rastafari worldview, it is also a liberation theology which calls for the spiritual, political and economic development and release from oppression of Africans and their descendants. The Rastafari have three main principles: redemption, repatriation and liberation. They desire to restore Blacks to their birthright as kings and queens and to regain Africa for all of its descendants.
Before comparing elements of Rastafarianism to a hermeneutics of suspicion and liberation theology, we must first understand liberation theology. In his book, Liberation Theology, author M. D. Litonjua (38) argues that a theology that liberates works from the bottom up, in other words the theology is liberating for the marginalized and oppressed, not the status quo or dominant ideology in control of society “In the hands of Jesus and the prophets, theology was not only a religious instrument, but also a social and political instrument which disturbed the sociopolitical establishment as they announced the Good News of salvation to the disenfranchised and the outcast.”
We can see that the Rastafarian theology is definitely one that disturbs the sociopolitical establishment from its unconventional and often misunderstood practices, such as dreadlocks, use of marijuana, and insistence that a Black man is God. In the hermeneutics of the Bible, the Rastafari trace Haile Selassie’s origins back to Jesus himself, by claiming that he is a descendant of the Bible’s wisest ruler, King Solomon, son of David. In passages from the Bible often concealed in traditional theological worldviews, the Rastafari pay homage to passages describing a Black God, the Lion of Judah, wh...