What does the "aura of office" mean?

Question

I am reading the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and I bumped into this phrase which I've never heard before. The sentence reads:

Weber located the origins of freedom not in the Enlightenment, but in the Puritan Anglo-American tradition; the struggle to establish liberty of conscience and worship, he argued, was the cornerstone of all other human rights. The vanguard of that struggle was the Protestant sects—Baptists, Quakers and others—whose influence in Germany had been eclipsed by the Lutheran Church and its "aura of office." Weber acknowledged that Lutheranism began as a radical movement, but he viewed its trajectory as moving in an increasingly illiberal direction, endorsing state power against individual freedom and, allegedly like Catholicism, encouraging passive adaptation to existing conditions rather than soliciting innovation and risk.

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Answer 1

It's not a known phrase, so you could have perhaps looked up 'aura' and 'office' respectively in a dictionary and found the answer. However, 'office' has many different meanings so I appreciate it might be tricky.

Although the first meaning of 'office' that might come to mind is a physical place of work, the first definition in Webster's dictionary is

a special duty, charge, or position conferred by an exercise of governmental authority and for a public purpose : a position of authority to exercise a public function and to receive whatever emoluments may belong to it.

So the 'office' of a person or organisation is the authority that they hold.

An 'aura' is defined as:

a distinctive atmosphere surrounding a given source.

I would understand their "aura of office", meant sincerely, to be the full extent of their authority or influence, including the furthermost reaches. However, your quote places the expression in quotation marks which may indicate a less than sincere use of the expression. A comparable expression is when a person is said to exude an "aura of confidence". This can be sincere - that a person is so self-confident it is visible, as if it were an aura around them; it can also be insincere and suggest that they are projecting a false impression of confidence. It may be that the writer of your quotation is trying to say that the church perceives their own influence to be greater than it is.