Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 60 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous alumni award winners with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. This February 1977 Classic article celebrates Dr. Ray Summers, 1977 Distinguished Alumnus and 1985 Herbert H. Reynolds Retired Faculty Award recipient. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about his year’s event and honorees.
Originally published in The Baylor Line’s February 1977 issue. Part of the 2025 Hall of Fame: Rewind series.
“I didn’t plan to be a teacher, and I never remember having aspirations to teach,” said Ray Summers, Th.D., as he sat in the den of his home, the second house built in Baylor’s “Fort Faculty.”
Ray and Jesse Summers moved into their home in 1967 when Dr. Summers accepted the position of professor and chairman of the religion department. The den walls, covered with such souvenirs as hand-beaten brass plates from Damascus and an Aztec calendar from Mexico, reflect the Summers’ lifelong love for traveling.
The sliding glass window wall overlooks a neatly manicured backyard with a fountain and a fish pond. A gardener, bird watcher and nature lover, Dr. Summers admits to being a country boy and “a frustrated farmer at heart.”
“I didn’t plan to teach. I responded to the call to preach as a senior in high school in my home church in Allen, Texas, and I chose missions as a career as a junior in Baylor,” he explained.
In addition to his classroom studies of the Bible at Baylor, Dr. Summers was taught the meaning of one verse quite vividly by President Pat Neff himself.
The verse? “Be sure your sins will find you out.”
The occasion?
“On registration day for the spring quarter of 1933, the year I graduated, I saw Pat Neff leaving the administrative offices in Carroll Science Building while I was visiting with some friends in front of Old Main. I made a mental note that he had gone home for lunch,” said Dr. Summers.
En route to a psychology class in Carroll Science a few minutes later, Summers noticed a new student with a suitcase standing by the door of the president’s office.
“Seeing a chance to have some fun, I asked the new student if he wanted to see the president. He said he did. Assuming Mr. Neff had just left for lunch, I knocked loudly saying. ‘Are you in there, Pat?’
“To the amazement of both of us and to my embarrassment, he opened the door. I introduced the student and beat it on down to class,” Dr. Summers continued.
Although Mr. Neff made no further reference to the incident, Dr. Summers admits he thought about it throughout the quarter.
Then on graduation day, as Summers was shaking hands with Mr. Neff on the stage, the president said aloud, “Be sure your sins will find you out.” Although the audience was bewildered by the statement, Summers knew its significance immediately.
“For years afterwards when we would meet at conventions and conferences, Mr. Neff would look at me with the twinkle he always had in his eyes and say. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out.’ He was right,” Dr. Summers said.
After earning his bachelor’s degree and serving for a year as a pastor, Summers continued his preparation for the mission field at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
“I was in my last semester of study at Southwestern when Dr. Warren Scarborough, president of the seminary, called me into his office,” said Dr. Summers, reminiscing of one spring day in 1938.
“He asked me if I was willing to go anywhere God wanted me, and I told him I thought I was. I was already exploring the possibilities of going to Brazil or Yugoslavia.
“‘Good,’ said Dr. Scarborough, ‘we need you here. Dr. H. E. Dana is leaving, and we need you to teach New Testament.” I began teaching in summer school, and my first course was one on the history of Baptists,” Dr. Summers explained.
“For quite some time I continued to feel the yearning to go as a missionary to whatever country we were focusing on during any given missions day at the seminary.”
But he never went to the mission field, at least not as an appointed missionary himself. However, many of those who have sat in his classrooms have gone; and Dr. Summers has fulfilled his call to missions through his students.
Today, 395 of Dr. Summers’ students serve in 57 foreign countries, while 12 others serve at the headquarters of the Foreign Mission Board in Nashville, Tennessee.
Continuing as a teacher, Dr. Summers became dean of the School of Theology at Southwestern where he served until 1959, when he accepted an invitation to the James Buchanan Harrison Chair of New Testament at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
“It seems one can multiply in service in the classroom more than in any other way,” said Dr. Summers, who has multiplied his personal ministry through his textbooks as well as through those he has instructed.
His text on elementary Greek grammar is used at many institutions of higher education, including Moody Bible Institute and Notre Dame. Author of eight books, the best known of which are Worthy Is the Lamb and The Life Beyond. Dr. Summers has had his works translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian and Braille.
In 1964, after 26 years of teaching on the graduate level, Dr. Summers returned to Baylor University.
“I wanted to teach at Baylor because I felt that we as Southern Baptists were not doing what we needed to be doing in the modern day teaching of religion. We were not providing the highest possible quality of teaching in religion on the university level, leading to the Ph.D. degree, which is a prerequisite for a teaching position in the departments of religion in many state universities,” Dr. Summers explained.
Selected by the Baylor Alumni Association as the university’s Distinguished Alumni for 1977, Fredrika Gross Dudley and Dr. Ray Summers receive special recognition at the annual Distinguished Alumni awards banquet at Baylor on February 11.
Thus, Dr. Summers began at Baylor the first Ph.D. degree program in religion offered at any Baptist institution.
“Although the Th.D. degree has long been offered at our seminaries, it does not enjoy the same standing in some parts of the country and in foreign countries such as Japan as it has in this area. I felt we as Baptists had both a commitment and a stewardship to prepare our students to teach in institutions requiring Ph.D. degrees,” said Dr. Summers.
Since the beginning of the program in 1967, 34 students have been graduated, and all but four are teaching religion. Many of the students have unique ministries in secular institutions and schools supported by other denominations and faiths.
For example, the first Ph.D. recipient, Wayne Denton, is teaching protestant religion at Christian Brothers School, a Roman Catholic school in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Ph.D. recipients join other of Dr. Summers’ students, who are now serving as teachers or administrators in a total of 65 colleges, universities and seminaries.
In 1975, some of these students joined with other esteemed theologians to publish a festschrift collection of articles, entitled New Testament Studies, in honor of their teacher’s 65th year.
The page of acknowledgments at the front of the festschrift begins, “Baylor University honors itself as it honors its distinguished son, Ray Summers.”
Indeed Dr. Summers, both through his own distinguished career and through those of his students, has brought honor to Baylor University. How appropriate that the university has chosen to bestow upon him one of its most coveted honors, that of Distinguished Alumnus for 1977.
