- ISSN: 0923-7771
- E-ISSN: 2665-9492
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OAOpgepast: de beul komt! Dominee Roelof Jan Willem Rudolph en het debat rond de doodstraf
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: DNK: Documentatieblad voor de Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis na 1800, Volume 48, Issue 103, Dec 2025, p. 94 - 123
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- 01 Dec 2025
Abstract
Attention: the executioner is coming! Reverend Roelof Jan Willem Rudolph and the debate around the death penalty
For a long time, the death penalty was a self-evident sentence for crimes. In Enlightenment, partly due to the thinking of the Italian philosopher and politician Cesare Beccaria, more attention was paid to the humanization of criminal law and the abolition of the death penalty. After a long debate, also in public, the liberal-minded Dutch parliament abolished the death penalty. Despite this, a majority of Orthodox Christians and conservatives remained in favor of the death penalty. One of them was Reverend Roelof Rudolph. His arguments were not only social and criminal in nature, but also deeply religious. When he once let slip that he wanted to act as an executioner, when no one wanted to carry out the sentence, it continued to haunt him throughout his political career. In the failure of this, his position on the death penalty played a secondary role. He continued to fight – with a few supporters – for the reintroduction of the death penalty, but because of his theological argumentation and the passionate way in which it was propagated, he did not succeed in provoking a substantial discussion. Shortly after the Second World War, the theologian A.A. van Ruler also tried to rekindle the debate, but he too received little response.
