Organizational Trustworthiness as Covenantal Stewardship: A Christian Theological Reconstruction

This conceptual article develops covenantal stewardship as a Christian, Orthodox-inflected normative reconstruction of organizational trustworthiness. Drawing on the ability-benevolence-integrity (ABI) model, philosophical trust scholarship, and management, spirituality, and religion scholarship, it develops a warrant-oriented extension of ABI that shifts attention from perceived trustworthiness to warranted reception of vulnerability. Under power asymmetry, ability, benevolence, and integrity are reconstructed as stewardship competence, covenantal care, and truth-shaped faithfulness. Warranted trustworthiness requires stewardship competence, covenantal care, and truth-shaped faithfulness to become visible in acknowledgment of the focal vulnerability, protected voice and recourse, and, after harm, truthful, proportionate, verifiable repair. The trustee-side turn is not itself novel; what theological reconstruction adds is a thicker account of persons, entrusted power, sin, and repair, together with a diagnostic distinguishing trust language that protects vulnerability from language that sacralizes compliance. Covenantal stewardship therefore constrains managerial judgment without determining it.