Born in Beverley Hills, California, Gottschalk graduated from
Harvard School, a former military school in Los Angeles. He obtained a BA in 1962 from
Occidental College, an MA in 1963 from the
University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in history in 1969, also from UC Berkeley, for a thesis entitled
The emergence of Christian science in American religious life, 1885–1910; the thesis became his first book, published in 1973.
Martin E. Marty reviewed the book saying it "should remain a standard work on Christian Science formation and its relative acceptance in America for years to come." From 1967 to 1975 he was an assistant, then associate, professor of history in the department of government and humanities at the
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Gottschalk published articles on Christian Science in several encyclopedias and journals, including
The Christian Century,
Theology Today, and the
Union Seminary Quarterly Review. From 1978 until 1990, Gottschalk worked for the Christian Science church's Committee on Publication in Boston, but left after a disagreement about the church's direction. In 1989 he gave an interview to
U.S. News & World Report in which he said the church had become "worldly"; he was concerned about the amount of money it had spent during the 1980s on radio and television services. In March 1990, he told the church's board of directors that he believed it was suppressing internal dissent, and left his position shortly afterwards. From then until his death he worked as an independent scholar. In the 1990s he led a group known as the Mailing Fund which published documents critical of the church. In 2006 his final work, ''Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism'', was published through Indiana University Press posthumously, it analyzed many of the controversies of Eddy's last two decades in what Mary Bednarowski called "a major contribution" to the effort to understand Eddy's life and theology. ==Selected works==