耶魯愛丁堡點滴：那一段 … 被遺忘的時光 …

一個月前的耶魯愛丁堡會議最後一天，七月一日早上，我發表論文。文章引言的第一段如此說：

Exactly nine years ago on this day (1 July), Hong Kong ceased to be a colony of the United Kingdom. On 19 December 1984, the Sino-British Joint Declaration concerning the future of Hong Kong was signed in Beijing by the then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the then-Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang. By this agreement, the political future of the city was confirmed: it was to become a Special Administrative Region under the sovereignty of the Peoples’ Republic of China, after being a colony of the United Kingdom for more than 150 years. Symbolically the signing of the joint declaration stood almost at the middle point of the decade. For some, it ceremonially marked the beginning of the end while for others it represented the dawn of a new era. This paradoxical juxtaposition created certain apparently contradictory phenomena and excessive intensities in almost all aspects of the Hong Kong society throughout the 1980s.

我的文章嘗試進入上世紀八十年代香港的歷史現場，當社會進入非殖民化歷程之際，在社會情境和教會神學議論之間，檢視某機構的影音事工跟那時風起雲湧的急變處境的相互關係。

在文章裡，我嘗試把那個事工放回那個時代那個城市的歷史處境和神學脈絡裡，認為製作人員儘管並不完全自覺，但實質上那些製作都是以影音媒體盛載的、高度處境化的公共神學宣言，而且是當時香港基督教重新議論本身神學議題 (theological re-negotiation) 的一環。

算是盡點棉力也好，是滿足自己的情意結也好，但能夠藉著一次處境神學反省的小練習，把那段無人記念、注定要被湮沒的過去，帶到神學殿堂的討論裡，打個小印記，雪泥熊爪，片刻歡娛，於願已足。

我結語的最後一段說：

Nonetheless, the media form that embodied their theological expressions was transient by its very nature. A feature-length multivision production, being a complex synchronisation of several thousand individual slides and a stereo soundtrack, was difficult to be maintained as a complete whole over time. This transitory character of the medium was, ironically, emblematic of the highly circumstantial nature of the theological stance articulated in the programmes, which was perhaps compatible with the ever-changing context that it attempted to engage. When the context changed, the theological message changed, and perhaps the theological stance might have changed, and the same medium was never used by the organisation again after that decade.

那從本質、從開始就已經注定了，是一段要被遺忘的時光。