Weren’t these Bible texts written in a patriarchal culture, while the main thrust of Scripture is toward complete equality of men and women?

We recognize that Scripture sometimes regulates undesirable relationships without condoning them as permanent ideals. For example, Jesus said to the Pharisees, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning" (Matthew 19:8). Another example is Paul's regulation of how Christians sue each other, even though "the very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already" (1 Corinthians 6:1-8). Another example is the regulation of how Christian slaves were to relate to their masters, even though Paul longed for every slave to be received by his master "no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother" (Philemon 16).

But we do not put the loving headship of husbands or the godly eldership of men in the same category with divorce, lawsuits, or slavery. The reason we don't is threefold:

1. Male and female personhood, with some corresponding role distinctions, is rooted in God's act of creation (Genesis 1 and 2) before the sinful distortions of the status quo were established (Genesis 3). This argument is the same one, we believe, that evangelical feminists would use to defend heterosexual marriage against the (increasingly prevalent) argument that the "leveling thrust" of the Bible leads properly to homosexual alliances. They would say No, because the leveling thrust of the Bible is not meant to dismantle the created order of nature. That is our fundamental argument as well.
    
2. The redemptive thrust of the Bible does not aim at abolishing headship and submission but at transforming them for their original purposes in the created order.
    
3. The Bible contains no indictments of loving headship and gives no encouragements to forsake it. Therefore it is wrong to portray the Bible as overwhelmingly egalitarian with a few contextually relativized patriarchal texts. The contra-headship thrust of Scripture simply does not exist. It seems to exist only when Scripture's aim to redeem headship and submission is portrayed as undermining them.