The purpose of this book is to find a remedy to the fact that, as the blurb states, ‘Luther's legacy did not unfold as he himself would have hoped or expected’, the paths not taken of the title. It is not made entirely clear what the author thinks these might have been. What is made clear, and constitutes the substance of the book, is the author's notion that Lutheran theology, defeated, as it were, or diminished, by the philosophical constraints placed upon it by Kantianism, could, at least potentially, be rescued by being read through the philosophy of Leibniz. ‘The relation of this complex of Luther's ideas in that volcanic text [i.e. in his De servo arbitrio] to cheery Leibniz's Theodicy is the tangled knot that this book proposes patiently to untie’ (p. 5). This an interesting and plausible proposition: there are definitely Christological elements in Leibniz's thought, indeed the best possible of all worlds that God decides to create is the one to be saved by the ‘Son's Godforsaken death and the Spirit coming to dwell in a temple made of unclean people’ (p. 224). If Leibniz does not quite succeed in restoring Luther, it is because, the author contends, he remains a philosopher and does not quite make it as a theologian: he fails to ‘argue explicitly on the basis of propositions he borrowed from revealed theology’ (p. 226). This book is for theologians but will be of interest to philosophers and historians of ideas. It is, unfortunately, marred by a number of lapses of style and spelling: p. 13, half-way down, for ‘alternate’ read ‘alternative’; p. 14, bottom, Geistesphilosophie; p. 17, sentence beginning ‘Yet word’, either supply a verb for the subordinate clause introduced by the first ‘that’ or take out the last ‘that’; p. 19, two-thirds of the way down, ‘theologoumenon’; p. 21, one-third of the way down, ‘custodem’; p. 28, two-thirds of the way down, ‘criterion’; p. 37, bottom, for ‘impugns’ substitute ‘asserts’/‘states’; p. 53, near top, ‘later’ (one ‘t’); p. 60, near top, similis; p. 220, near top, ‘extra mundum’; p. 225, thirteen lines from top, substitute ‘to’ for ‘than’; p. 246, second paragraph, Monologion, Proslogion (similarly in corresponding note and n. 97); p. 253, first paragraph, ‘There is a text’; p. 273, in the quotation from K. Schwarzwäller, ‘[Absicherung]’ is wrongly referred to as the original of ‘destabilisation’; it means the opposite.