What we have been told the Bible teaches versus what the Bible really teaches By Rebecca Merrill Groothuis 1. The man is the head of the home, which means he is to run the home, and other family members are required to submit to his God-ordained leadership. We need to interpret this term in its cultural context, not according to some cultural pretext of our own. Despite the many exhortations that church leaders repeatedly issue to Christian men to take leadership over their wives, nowhere does the Bible tell men to rule their wives. Even though the Bible was originally written to people living in a society in which men were legally and culturally obligated to govern their wives and the other members of their households, not once does the Bible encourage men to do this.
Men are to have the final authority over their children as well as their wives.
Nowhere does the Bible say that the father's authority over the children is to be any greater than the mother's. Throughout the Bible, God speaks directly to both men and women, and God speaks through both male and female prophets. There is no theological or biblical reason to argue that women are any less spiritually called or equipped than men to discern God's will or understand God's Word. Yet these advocates of male leadership contradict the Bible's teaching on the spiritual equality of men and women when they insist that a man is to hear from and obey God directly, while a woman is to hear from and obey God by hearing from and obeying her husband. Yet Peter is not telling women to submit to the spiritual authority of their husbands, for he is addressing women who have rebelled against their husbands' spiritual authority by rejecting their husbands' religions and converting to Christianity.